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!

The easiest way would be using a Mac with kJams and its built in store (powered by Tricerasoft). Songs are $1-$2. Just hit up each singer per song (in some places, like Brazil, most karaoke is pay-for-play).

On Windows, the options aren’t as rosy. You could use the Tricarasoft player and its built-in store. Or you could use the Tricerasoft or Buykaraokedownloads web stores with Winamp or PyKaraoke.

There’s a free option too: download using mIRC. Set up is tricky, but I made a step by step guide: Free karaoke music (using mIRC). Downloads won’t be as fast, but they’ll be fast enough. The selection will be just as good if not better–there are a few people with huge libraries sharing consistently.

The only hitch is that the wifi router at the venue will need to have UPnP turned on, or you’ll need to use your own 3g card. Make sure to test first.

If you use both Mac and Windows, t’s a tough call between kJams and Winamp. If you’re going to be actively updating your library and your song books, kJams is it.

If you want to set things up once, never think about it again, and spend your karaoke night hitting on people, use Winamp.

Now, without further ado, the verdicts:

The best karaoke software for Mac OS X: kJams

The best karaoke software for Windows: Winamp

The best karaoke software for Linux: PyKaraoke

Battle tested in the dormitories of our youth, on the Pentiums of yesteryear, Winamp + CDG plugin is lightning fast and un-fuckwithable. Also, everybody knows how it works, making it easy to enlist helpers (or let singers browse on their own). Here’s how to get it running…

Setting up Winamp:

1. Download Winamp  
2. Do a full install, but uncheck everything on the “Get the Most out of Winamp” screen. Choose “Winamp Classic” skin.
3. Close the EQ, click the menu button in the top left corner and click “Media Library”
4. Close the various media library panes until you just have a search field and a list, and attach it to the side of the player (see below)
5. Unzip your music to .cdg & .mp3 (winamp)
6. Drag your karaoke music folder into your library.

Install the CDG plugin:

1. Quit Winamp
2. Download the CDG plugin
3. Run the installer

When you restart Winamp and play a karaoke track, a window should show up, like this:

If you right-click on the video window, you can make it bigger, or make it full screen.

Now, go to Menu -> Options -> Media Library and change the dropdown from “Plays Selected Item(s)” to “Enqueues Selected Item(s)”. Now you can add songs to the playlist by double-clicking or hitting enter, and it’s harder to interrupt the song that’s playing.

Bonus Trippiness: Go to Menu -> Options -> Plugins -> Visualization and under “Fullscreen Settings” choose your second monitor as the display adapter and in the bottom left check “Desktop Mode”. Then if you set the lyrics window to partially occupy the screen, Winamp trippiness will display around the borders. Eat it, Karafun!

But, its iTunes-like interface makes the most basic part of running a karaoke night awkward and annoying. iTunes is great, but for karaoke the Winamp-style interface is better.

The iTunes innovation

iTunes’s central innovation as a player was to move away from the playlist-centric interface pioneered by Winamp. When mp3s were a novelty and you had a few hundred random singles, listening to your mp3s meant making a playlist, so the first mp3 player was built around on-the-fly playlists. As people started listening to all of the music on their computer, the more conventional sorting (by artist, and by album) reasserted itself. iTunes recognized that, and built everything around the listbox. What Ian Rogers wryly calls the “spreadsheet that plays music”, works great for 95% of people 95% of the time. The other (funnier) innovation that iTunes made was “oh yeah, normal people won’t give a fuck about skins”, but that’s another story.

iTunes moved away from on-the-fly playlists

iTunes keeps playlists of course, but recasts them as something you use sometimes, not something you do every time you listen to music. And since you can assume the user likes their music, it’s no big deal if iTunes just keeps on going when it gets to the end of the album. Like, whatever. It’ll just play the next album by that artist, or go from Queen to Queensryche.

But for Karaoke nights, that’s the whole game!

The thing is, when you’re doing a karaoke night, the old Winamp interface is a much better fit to the task. First, a karaoke night is all about making a new playlist every time. People want a particular song. And after that song’s done, it’s better to have silence than to have the wrong song, or a song nobody wants (which is a jarring fuckup)..

Second, seeing the playlist is just as important as being able to add to it easily. People always wanna know who’s next. You always need to change somebody’s song or tweak the order (e.g. somebody’s out smoking a cigarette). So two side-by-side windows, for two equally important tasks, makes perfect sense.

KJams, and hoops.

KJams takes the iTunes road, and has to jump through hoops to address these basic tasks. On the one hand, it recognizes the importance of on-the-fly creation, so KJams lets you designate a “Target Playlist” where when you double click on any track it gets added to the target playlist. Okay, so this saves you having to drag and drop every time, but you still can’t *see* the playlist without switching to it.

And when you go up to the search field to find a song, you end up searching just the playlist instead of your whole library, so you have to click on the library and reenter the search. I’ve seen people do this hundreds of times, and I do it myself quite a bitThis is annoying in iTunes too, but in iTunes you spend less time making on-the-fly playlists. Come to think of it, when I’m DJ’ing out of iTunes I’ll open up my playlist in a separate Window to solve this problem. But in KJams you can’t do that yet.

So you could fix that by having searches always search the full library, but then you’re introducing another conceptual break. And you’d still have to close out the search to make the playlist reappear. Ugh.

Conclusion

Dave, you gotta switch to a two-window interface a la Winamp or PyKaraoke. Sure, being the “iTunes of Karaoke” for Mac makes the app familiar and gives it a certain cache. It might make some of the music-management UI better.

But it is such a ball-and-chain around your neck when you’re doing a karaoke night. When I first started using Winamp it was like walking on air, everything was so fast and required so few keystrokes.

Seriously, first purchase.

Here’s why:

1. More crap to carry around.
2. Sometimes you won’t have it on you.
3. You need a power supply or two USB ports and a special cable.
4. Which you’ll leave at home, or lose (or live in constant fear of this).
5. One more thing to set up / break down.
6. One more thing to accidentally unplug during your set.

$120 gets you a 500GB internal drive. You won’t have to lug an external to your set, and if you have an older laptop, your computer will just run faster.

On all Macbooks and the new (silver & black) Macbook Pro’s the hard drive is user-serviceable and it’s super easy to switch it out. If you’re nervous any mildly computer savvy friend could help.

On the old Macbook Pro you have to buy a special screwdriver and take apart your computer, but it’s not too hard. I followed this guide and it worked great: Upgrade Your MacBook Pro’s Hard Drive.

On Macs just use your external HDD and Time Machine to backup your stuff and move it over, just like you’d do with a new computer (you’ll need the DVD that came with your Mac too). It’s super easy.

After years of constantly having like 1GB free on my laptop, I finally did it, and it totally changed how I use my computer.

1. I never think twice about downloading something.
2. I’m not always needing to delete stuff.
3. I have all my music and karaoke stuff on me all the time.
4. Set up and break down is that much simpler.
5. Got a free USB port (I only have two).
6. I use my old external drive for Time Machine so I’ll never lose more than a few days of data ever again! When I think of all the awesome stuff I’ve lost from hard drive crashes, lost DVD backups, and stolen laptops it’s boggling.

So yeah, if you have $120, just get a big ass hard drive.