Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, an independent journalist and programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I created Upcoming.org and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Alt-Rock Karaoke

Posted Apr 2, 2003

A Usenet group devoted to swapping karaoke versions of popular songs is unusually popular, with 7500+ songs posted in the last month alone. I don't know where the original files are coming from, but the diversity and timeliness of available files in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke is staggering. The standards are all represented ("Celebration," "I Will Survive," and "Mandy"), along with brand new songs spanning the genres of alt-rock, country, and pop. The MP3s are bundled into ZIP files along with mysterious .CDG files, so I did a little research.

Apparently, karaoke CDs are distributed in a format called CD+G, which stores images and lyrics information along with the uncompressed audio. Clever karaoke fans developed software to rip and compress these discs into a format they call MP3+G. It looks like the .CDG file is all of the goofy images, lyrics, and metadata that is normally displayed by specialized karaoke players.

Some of the more oddball gems were karaoke versions of King Missile's "Detachable Penis," Nirvana's "You Know You're Right," Electric 6's "High Voltage," Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run," PJ Harvey's "One Line," and the Dead Kennedys' "Too Drunk To Fuck." Is there really much overlap between karaoke and Dead Kennedys fans?

Anyway, enjoy singing along to these karaoke renditions of The Strokes' "Last Nite," Andrew WK's "Party Hard," and the White Stripes' "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground."

4 Comments (Add Yours)

Apr 2, 2003
1:45 PM

mathowie wrote:

Are there any newsgroups with recorded karaoke versions of songs? I used to love searching napster back in the day for karaoke tracks that people recorded of themselves. There's a strange beauty in butchered renditions of classics.

Apr 2, 2003
2:51 PM

Andy wrote:

I can't find anything in Usenet. Until then, there's always the terrible Karaoke Cam.

Apr 12, 2003
12:19 AM

shekamukamakinens wrote:

is it possible to make my own karaoke sond.. i mean..cut down the text in the sond and let stay only the music?m?

May 5, 2003
3:43 AM

smartbomb wrote:

Do I have to sign up to dl these files? Im not exactly starting a karaoke business but it'd be a great refreshing alternative to my old tunes

Leave a comment

Ads via The Deck

October 12, 2008

Ultima creator Richard Garriott launched into space — Lord British spending 10 days on the International Space Station for a cool $30 million

Moral psychology testing on Amazon Mechanical Turk — Brendan O'Connor's blog is one of my new favorites; he works at Dolores Labs

Conplot, a commandline plotter with ASCII art — for use with piping from sort|uniq -c and the like

October 11, 2008

Preview of Gomibako, like Tetris with garbage — every object has physical properties, so trash can be crushed, burned, or toppled

October 10, 2008

Drew on the financial crisis — see also: Woot's Google ads (via)

Gary Vaynerchuk on recession-proof marketing and dumb advertising — don't miss the part where he queries his UStream followers in real-time

You Fell Asleep Watching A DVD (via)

October 9, 2008

Content-aware scaling in Photoshop CS4 — from SIGGRAPH demo to product in a year (via)

Unicode Snowman for You — ☃

October 8, 2008

Tuttuki Bako, poke virtual characters in a little box — like Tamagotchi meets Levelhead

Kevin Mitnick on the indictment of Sarah Palin's email hacker — he also touches on his own recent encounter with U.S. customs

Portal: Prelude, extensive fan-made Portal mod, released a day early — Gamespy loved it, but warns that it's very hard

Inspired by xkcd comic, YouTube adds audio previews for comments — this works nicely for quick speech synthesis with simple URL hacking

NYT to close International Herald Tribune website — I remember when their 2000 redesign blew away everyone with impressive DHTML features

Steven Levy visits Jay Walker's insane personal library — funny, I keep all my priceless artifacts in cardboard boxes in the basement

October 7, 2008

Yahoo! Calendar finally, finally launches redesign — ten years in the making

Chuck Klosterman's Brief History of the 21st Century — like Kottke said, there's too much in here to like; related: Phone Sex AI (via)

YouTube in Super HD! — after it buffers, try clicking "Restart" to get it in sync (via)

Little Big Computer, a virtual electronic 8-bit calculator built in Little Big Planet — see also: Mechanical 5-bit Calculator in the Half-Life engine

October 6, 2008

Mail Goggles, Gmail tries to prevent late-night drunk emails — this could also be used to keep you from answering personal email during work hours

DJ Z-Trip's Obama Mix — very listenable pastiche of rock and hip-hop from Pink Floyd to Saul Williams with a strong political undercurrent

This American Life's Another Frightening Show About the Economy — followup to The Giant Pool of Money episode from May

Take on Me: The Literal Version — if songs sang what was happening in the music video (via)

TIGSource's Bootleg Demake competition winners — best game competition ever

Sarah Palin's evening gown entry to the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — "In Alaska, we have mosquitoes."

Damn It Feels Good To Be a Banksta — Banksta 4 Life

The Big Picture on Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from Above photographs — with convenient Google Maps links for each

October 4, 2008

Keith Loutit's tilt-shifted time-lapse videos — reminds me of an ant colony (via)

The VP Debate on Auto-Tune — it's got a beat and you can dance to it (via)

October 3, 2008

Flickr adds rainbow-vomiting panda feature to Explore — finally, some innovation in the photo sharing space (via)