Via Wayne: amazing kid version of “Don’t Matter”. Fight for your right to repurpose.

BTW: once when I was in Trinidad I jumped in on somebody elses’s rendition of this (he was down) and did Remix to Ignition and Wyclef – Stripper Song (”Just cause she dance the go go…”). Super fun, you should try it.

One of my visions is to see somebody DJ a karaoke night off turntables, mixing and scratching with synced video. It’s possible, I looked it up! The simplest way is with Serato Scratch and a $1500 Rane mixer. Ouch. But some clubs have these, so if I ever get a karaoke night at a clubby club… hmm…

Then there’s a $100 solution that doesn’t require any special hardware… Ms. Pinky / Max MSP.

Then there’s the free software / linux route: xwax. Which you can also use with Puredata using this thing. I fully expect to be in the company of tons of linux VJ nerds when I get to brazil. Maybe they can help me set it up. Woo!

xwax

The first official karaokecrime.com show happened in Providence last Thursday at Matthewson Street. The Dance Troupe raised a ton of money for their tour, and the danceparty jam session was Awesome.

I’m posting the karaoke megamix exactly as I ran it last night. Ableton crapped out on me yesterday before the show, so I didn’t even have time to mix it. But whatever, I’m posting as is while I’m excited. My favorite part is the “Go DJ” verse over “Love is Gone”.

Makes me teary.

Still lookin for a good way to post 10 minute plus videos that are fair-use heavy. In the meantime: Karaoke Megamix 1

(almost none of this stuff is necessary) photo by…

Running a karaoke night is cheap and easy. Here’s all you need:

1. Laptop
2. Songs
3. Karaoke Software
4. Songbooks
5. Microphones and a PA
6. Old computer monitor

5 & 6 barely count. You can get clunky 17″ monitors for free on craigslist or freecycle. Most venues have a PA w/ mics. Got friends who play in a band? They can help scrounge something together.

So that leaves us with a laptop, songs, karaoke software, and songbooks. I made simple guides to cover each step. Spend a little time now, and next week you’ll have a working karaoke setup.

If anything seems confusing, just find a computery friend to help. They’ll know how to do all of this stuff.

1. What you need for a karaoke laptop
2. How to download Karaoke songs
3. The best free karaoke software for Mac, Windows, and Linux
4. How to make karaoke songbooks

Next up… tips on running a karaoke night!

Cnce you’re music’s in kJams, hide all columns except the ones you want, select all your songs, copy/paste them into TextEdit, and use find and replace to turn the tabs into hyphens.   

If that sounds like a mouthful, read more for step by step instructions…

For Windows, see this post: The easiest way to make a karaoke song book on Windows (or Linux).

1. Get kJams and import your music
2. Ctrl-click on the “Song Name” column heading and a dropdown will appear.
3. Uncheck everything except “Artist” and “Song Name” to make all other columns disappear.
4. If the artist info is mixed in with the song name, uncheck Artist as well.
5. Click column titles to search by Artist or Song Name
6. Hit Cmd-A (Select All) and Cmd-C (Copy)
7. Open TextEdit (it’s in your Applications folder) and hit Cmd-V (Paste). Your song list should appear.
8. If the Artist info was mixed in with the song name, you’re done! Print it!
9. If not, you’ll want to turn those white spaces (tabs) between artist and song name into hyphens
10. Double click on the blank space between the artist and the song name. The blank space should highlight blue.
11. Hit Cmd-C (Copy) and Cmd-F (Find) and Cmd-V (Paste). That should paste a similar blank space into the “Find” field.
12. Click in the “Replace” field, hit spacebar, type a hyphen, and hit space bar (” – “)
13. Click “Replace All”.

Voila. You now have something that looks like a song list. Just paste that into Word or OpenOffice and add columns, adjust the margins, the font-size etc.

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Here’s how–for Mac, Windows, and Linux;

With kJams (Mac): Right click on videos, click “Export QuickTime” and choose a destination folder. You need to register ($40) to convert more than 10 videos at a time. Video quality is great.

With Power CD+G to Video Converter (Windows): Also costs $40 to register; not useful in trial mode.

With cdg2video (linux): you’ve got to build it yourself, no Ubuntu packages, only Gentoo ebuild. Free as in freedom, baby.

With PyKaraoke (Windows and Linux): There’s a “convert to mpg” option. Haven’t tested it, but if it’s broken they’ll fix it.

Now, there should be a way to do this for free on all platforms with VLC. VLC is supposed to be able to transcode any format it can play into a range of formats (including Quicktime, h264, etc). Plus it’s scriptable, so if you can convert one file, you can convert a whole library.

But I tried all the options I could think of and couldn’t get it to work. The resulting videos would play in VLC, but with errors in iTunes. Ableton Live must’ve picked up on those errors in its pre-analysis and wouldn’t even try to import them.

Right now I’m happy with kJams, so if anyone finds the magic parameters, let me know.