Thinking big about karaoke. Democratizing tools, breaking rules.
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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
Karafun is one of the most popular karaoke players for Windows. Here’s why it sucks:
The only fun thing about it is that it plays funny video effects behind the karaoke lyrics. But with winamp you can run your favorite visualizations from 1998 around the lyrics, so whatevs.
This guide will show you how to download virtually any karaoke song for free, using MiRC and Omenserve/Autoget. I owe a huge thank you to all the folks on the #karaoke+mp3s channel for making kmp3s.com–that tutorial is the foundation for this one.
These tools are pretty old-school, and setting them up is a pain. But it’s worth the trouble to download karaoke tracks on demand. For KJs, this is a must.
MiRC is Windows only, but Mac users can run it in Parallels (that’s what I do) and this guide will cover that.
I’ve got three posts on the subject. But the winners are kJams (Mac), Winamp + CDG plugin (Windows), and PyKaraoke (Linux).
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
Winamp isn’t even karaoke software. That’s probably what makes it so awesome.
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…
Free Karaoke Music