So, this is an idea
Karaoke night will take place every Wednesday. Timewise, it will start at 6pm Pacific time, or 9pm EST.
CURRENTLY ON HIATUS.
Everyone is welcome to join in.
To participate, you'll need the following:
- A Livestream account
- Access to the channel (xkcdkaraoke)
[This can be granted to you by a number of people - ask in the channel or email me)
- Procaster
- A microphone
- The ability to make noises with your mouth
- A song to sing!
That's it. You can jump into the IRC channel (if you have a real IRC client) here: irc://irc.foonetic.net/#xkcd-hugs
and you can view the stream (used for listening to/laughing at people attempting songs) at this link. If it looks suspiciously similar to the one for movie night, you're being silly, since it's totally not the same page. At all. You can use the IRC client on the page to chat while watching the stream.
INSTRUCTIONS:
To participate, you should set your microphone to output to your sound device, such that you can play music and sing over the top of it.
Next, create a Livestream account - either account type will do, but for simplicity's sake you should go with a Viewer account. PM me the name of your new account and I'll grant you access to the karaoke channel.
To broadcast, login to Procaster with your username and password and select the xkcdkaraoke channel (which should be your only one). Then click "Screen", and go live/start broadcasting. The output of your soundcard will then be recorded as the stream, so we'll hear the same thing you do.
MORE INSTRUCTIONS
In order to keep things running smoothly, keep the following things in mind:
- Turns and length of turns are decided on-the-fly by the moderators of #xkcd-hugs.
- The person broadcasting may also pass their turn on to someone else who is waiting to participate.
- If we're allowing multiple songs-per-turn, you can take requests from the audience. If you can find it on YouTube or otherwise play it on your computer, you can do it. You do not have to honour requests or do anything you are uncomfortable with though, because ideally this is about fun.
- Ask before attempting to broadcast unless it is your turn.
- A song may only be attempted by one person per night, to avoid one-upsmanship and such.
We have a library of songs you're welcome to use for songs, both with vocals and without. For legal reasons this is only Creative Commons content, but currently it consists of 20 Jonathan Coulton songs and both Brad Sucks albums and demos for Brad Sucks - Guess Who's A Mess. I'll be adding 80+ songs from South by Southwest 2009 soon. You can stream the songs if you have QuickTime installed, or you can stream them directly using a browser that has support for Ogg Vorbis (Firefox 3.5, latest Google Chrome) if I've got them up in OGG format.
Spoiler:
If none of those suit you - feel free to use your own songs!
More details to come soon.
