How to Make a Karaoke Disc on a Mac

Karaoke is the art of singing along to an instrumental version of a popular song. From Japanese Karaoke bars where businessmen practice their craft for hours on end, to American homes where friends gather to both celebrate and humiliate themselves, it has become a worldwide phenomenon. If you are a little tired of the static song-list offered by many Karaoke bars and mass-produced Karaoke discs, you can make your own disc at home. Most brands of Karaoke software are only available for PCs, but there is software available for the Mac if you know where to look.

Things You'll Need

• Music files or CD

Instructions

1. Make sure your disk drive is compatible with CD+G formats. You will need to find the original spec sheet for your drive. The easiest way to do this is to use an online search engine to search for the spec sheet for your particular computer model. If you don't have a compatible disk drive - and if you are working with a Macintosh, your disk drive is almost certainly not compatible - you will have to buy a new disk drive. An external disk drive is the easiest to use. For a list of compatible drives and stores where you can buy the drives, see additional resources.

2. Head to the Karaoke KJams website (see additional resources), and read the system requirements to make sure your operating system is compatible.

3. Download the mac-compatible KJams Karaoke software. In order to actually burn a disc, you will need to purchase the full version of either KJams Lite or KJams Pro.
   Download the Burner 1.0a12 application from that same page.

4. Install the karaoke and burner software. A step-by-step guide will launch automatically when you open the software to install.

5. Choose the songs you want to burn onto your disc. If you have iTunes, make a playlist. If you want to burn songs from a CD, upload the CD to your computer before you burn the CD+G disc.

6. Make sure all these songs have at least the basic metadata. If you are in iTunes, click on a song and hit "Apple + I" to get information. If you are using a CD, find the music files on your hard drive and hit "Apple +I" to get information.
   This will bring up a window which has information about the track. Make sure the following fields are filled out:

   Artist
   Album
   Genre
   Year
   Category

7. Find and open the folder on your hard drive that holds the actual music files you want to burn. Find and open the KJams library folder. Copy the song files you want to burn from the music folder into the KJams library folder.

8. Open the KJams application. Create a playlist with the songs in the KJams library that you want to burn.

9. Click on the "Burn" tab. Select your "Playlist." Press "Burn."

Resources

• Compatible Disk Drives for Karoake Software
• CD+G Disk Drives on Amazon