My wife and I have decided, for better or for worse, to have friends over on New Years for an 80's themed party, including karaoke. This post is as much to document what I've found as to ask for questions.

You can buy karaoke compilation CDs from a number of vendors. They're all re-recordings with different bands, and there's no mechanism to preview the tunes from any of the web sites I've seen. Did the re-recording artist have a clue? Who knows? The vast bulk of the material comes in "CD+G" (also called "CDG") format, which is just a regular audio CD with secondary tracks that have timecode-driven graphics for the captions. There are various extensions, as well as VideoCD and DVD-based things, but CD+G seems to be where all the content can be found. I've poked around a bunch of different web sites that sell these things, and the best that I've seen, so far, is dbkaraoke.com. Prices are comparable to regular audio CDs. (Amazon does appear to also carry karaoke, but you have to dig a little to find it. dbkaraoke.com's prices seem to be lower.) I haven't gone looking locally for karaoke stuff, but most of the shops where I've noticed it in the past seem to cater to an Asian crowd, which means they're less likely to have as big a selection of the music we're looking for.

I initially thought I'd be stuck buying a special karaoke player, but that doesn't appear to be necessary. There's a CDG plugin for Winamp that does pretty much everything I could need, and it's free. You drop .cdg files next to your .mp3 files and it renders them onscreen. I can use any old Windows laptop for the audio output and singer's lyrics. I can use my cheesy old Radio Shack mixer, or maybe borrow something nicer from a friend. Then, I can use my existing stereo system. What more can you ask for?

The only really big question remaining is how I'm supposed to rip these karaoke discs. EAC doesn't support CD+G, but AudioGrabber (which is now freeware) apparently does. That seems like the way to go.

Any other thoughts? Am I missing anything?

EDIT: Looks like, in some cases, Amazon has better prices, and in others DBKaraoke has better prices. The inventory is quite different. Amazon is amazingly frustrating because they've apparently tuned their search engine to *not* find karaoke versions of songs, lest their customers buy the wrong thing and complain. That means you can search for "karaoke 80's", but not "karaoke devo" or whatever. *sigh*

Fry's Electronics has a fair sized selection, also. A friend got a 10-disc themed set for like 30 bucks.

i personally feel that karaoke was invented by the Japanese as revenge for america dropping the atom bomb on them

1-0 to japan