Building the Library

Just like with iTunes, all of your karaoke music is organized in a main library. From this library, you can search for music, build playlists, and of course play karaoke. The library allows you to organize music that is on your system—that is, music that is purchased through Kjams, as well as music that resides elsewhere on your hard drive—but it also allows you to include music that you don’t “own,” such as streaming music.

You have several options for building your library. You can:

• Purchase downloadable karaoke music using the built-in kJams store. This is the way most kJams users obtain their music.
• Download music from other music sites (including free songs)and index them into kJams.
• Copy music from your karaoke CD-Gs into the kJams library. This is called ripping.
• Index karaoke tunes that are already on your hard drive into the library.(This includes sample songs that you downloaded during installation.)
• Add streaming songs to your library.

Note:I used the word “index” rather than “copy” because kJams does NOT COPY when you add music to your library. It only makes a note of where the song resides on the internal drive and it then uses the original files right where they are. This can be a big problem for newbies who download music to their desktop and then add the files to the kJams library. Once the files are added, they think they can trash the file from the desktop. But in reality, this is the only file that exists.

If you are new to karaoke, you probably don’t have any tunes on your hard drive or any karaoke CDs to rip. No problem! To try out kJams’ features, you really only need to download a few songs. Free songs will work just fine. You can also go to the Chartbuster music store to find free streaming songs.

Before you start to build your library, I suggest you first:

1. Set up your purchase preferences here: Setting Purchase Preferences Temp
2. Read about meta data here: Understanding Tags (Meta Data)Temp

Then,for information on the different ways to get music into your library, click on the following:

Purchasing Music Through kJams Temp

Downloading Music from Other Sites Temp

Adding to the Library Temp

Ripping Temp

Adding Sample Songs

The first step in building your library is to index the sample songs you downloaded when you installed kJams. (By the way, it’s okay to skip this step. If you know you want to purchase music right away, then you don’t really need any sample songs.)

1. From the kJams main screen, click on File.
2. Click on Add to Library.
3. Locate and open the folder that contains the downloaded music files. (This is the file you specified during installation.)
4. Select the file.
5. Click on Open.

The music file is indexed to the library and is ready for playing.