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

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.