Karaoke players (like Winamp or VLC) can’t read inside .zip files, so you need to unzip all your karaoke to use them. Turns out, if you have a big library there are just too many files to use the unix wildcard *.

And you get an error like: -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long

Here’s how to move your huge library of karaoke songs to one folder, and unzip them. It’s well worth the trouble to be able to use Winamp (which is super-simple and solid for karaoke nights).

Open up Terminal. Type “cd Music/Karaoke/CDG” or whatever to get into your karaoke folder.

To copy to one folder:

mkdir ../onefolder/

find . -exec cp “{}” ../onefolder \; -print

To unzip all:

cd ../onefolder/

find . -exec unzip -o “{}” \; -print

To delete all (careful with this! If you’re not careful you could delete your entire hard drive!)

find ../onefolder/ -name “*.zip” -exec rm “{}” \; -print

If you don’t understand how terminal commands work, just use Finder and Spotlight to do the last step.

Sometimes you’ll get a big karaoke collection with a pre-made songbook. This is definitely the easiest way to get started.

But once you start downloading more songs, you’ll need a way to make your own books. Here are two quick guides to making songbooks.

On Windows, your book will be somewhat ugly and wasteful of paper without further fiddling. But this is definitely the best way to start.

The quick and dirty way to make a karaoke song book on Windows or Linux

The easiest way to make a karaoke song book on a Mac

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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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