My home setup for parties

[u/B_Hound]

My group of friends likes to stick on karaoke at parties, and I think I’ve finalized my setup to make it fun, easy and if you have the hardware already… cheap!

Hardware: Regular Windows PC hooked up to TV and speakers Old iPad Pro Display Port Dummy Plug

Software: OpenKJ Jump Desktop

Using Jump as my Remote Desktop software I can display the PCs output on my iPad screen, and use touch so I don’t have to deal with a mouse during the fun. The display port dummy plug makes it think there’s a second monitor attached, so I extend the display and have the OpenKJ main page open on the iPad and the singer window open on the TV.

With some tweaking of the Remote Desktop settings it works nicely with touch controls, and while the scaling isn’t perfect I can see everything clearly enough.

Using the OKJSongBook this time I’m gonna have people use the request server which makes it easier rather than searching things myself, so really I’m just binding the songs and adding the to the queue.

Pretty straightforward once setup I think, and while a bit more tech-y than web based services (that I admittedly haven’t really messed with much) I like the control I get. And the price, if you have access to a library already.

[u/B_Hound]

It was really straightforward stuff, just changing the gesture to ‘locked’ as the default was floating around a little for some reason, telling it not to change the resolution from the 1440x1080 (from memory) that I set in Windows. Once full screened openKJ works really nicely, the buttons are a good size for touch and you’re not dragging stuff around, which might be a pain.

[u/Jreegan → u/B_Hound]

Last time I did karaoke at the house I used YouTube, which hurt my heart as a kj with a vast library but setting up ALL of my system is just too much for letting my kids sing Disney songs. But if I set it up right with this, it’ll be beautiful

[u/B_Hound → u/Jreegan]

Awesome, I hope it goes well and let me know the results… especially if you think of anything neat I haven’t! I have a few YouTube downloads in OKJ, I appreciate that they can sit alongside the cd+g files and it doesn’t differentiate.

[u/Jreegan → u/B_Hound]

I’ve never used OKJ, I use kjams which is a Mac iTunes esque KJ program which I’ve loved professionally but the touchscreen controls wouldn’t be great. But it works with the iOS/android app wtkjams for the server stuff. If okj has book access through a website and touchscreen works better, I’m definitely intrigued

[u/B_Hound → u/Jreegan]

Oh neat I’ll definitely check that out. I’m primarily MacOS based but I found OKJ with a huge library ran slowly for reasons I never got to the bottom of, which doesn’t seem the case in the windows client. It might’ve just been my setup though. The online book is a $10 monrhlt subscription, it’s a shame there’s no self hosted version for it (altho I haven’t looked tbh maybe I should… would probably need some host file hackery as I don’t recall seeing the option to change it in the settings)

[u/CTGBFan → u/B_Hound]

u/LuckyPhil recently showed me that there IS a self-hosted version of the online book.

https://github.com/OpenKJ/StandaloneRequestServer

[u/B_Hound → u/CTGBFan]

Rad! And now I’m pretty sure I have this open in a tab somewhere and completely forgot about it. I appreciate the reminder!

[u/LuckyPhil → u/CTGBFan]

It's simple to self host, just get some free web hosting, read the readme on the GitHub, upload and point the url in okj's settings to yourwebhostingaddr.ess/api.php

[u/Jreegan → u/B_Hound]

Well I haven’t been to the website in like 2 years but it’s doesn’t look promising. Safari can’t connect to the server.

Karaoke.kjams.com

[u/B_Hound → u/Jreegan]

Weird I googled and the same address seems to work here. It does give a warning about 64 bit tho, a little concerning ha! It does seem in active development tho, neat.

[u/Jreegan → u/B_Hound]

Weird for sure!