Been doing karaoke as a new weekly social event at the bar, up from a total of zero social events a week. We use youtube and there’s tons of stuff I wouldn’t have expected on there, way better than choosing from a companies list. But there are some things I want to try that don’t exist.
Right now, I have an instrumental of a song and would like to make a video with the lyrics that I can sync up with the instrumental. I would be interested in learning how to remove vocals from existing tracks as well, but that seems a little bit more complicated and I don’t have time to make it THAT much of a hobby (for now.) I found an ancient program that works… emulated in windows 98… and it lags to the point of uselessness when trying to actually sync the words. When I try to run the same program in bottles I get a “specified device is not open or is not recognized by MCI” error when trying to add the audio.
My question is, does anyone know or have experience with making this kind of thing? What programs do you use? I’ve looked around a bit and it seems like there must be software for doing this, but the people who actually make karaoke videos seem to be protective of their “trade secrets” because they all want to charge a bit of money for requests over teaching others how to do it. I don’t begrudge them that, but I want to do it myself.
Any resources for learning the audio aspect of cutting out vocals would be appreciated as well!
This is something I’ve been very interested in lately as well (though to be clear, have not done anything with yet).
I love karaoke, but the bars never have the weird music I want to sing, and singing one song every 45 minutes if you’re lucky can be a bit of a drag, so some kind of diy solution would be rad. Never have even been to a bar that would pull up the YouTube stuff lol.
At one point I had one of those at-home karaoke stands that would cut the vocals out of any audio stream, and it did pretty ok at it, so that was tons of fun. Just plug your phone into it and pull up the Genius app (which can auto detect whats playing and do synced lyrics). That solution was 99% of what I wanted, just a slightly awkward piece of hardware in the middle. I’ve been dreaming about a piece of software that would do the same thing while being infinitely more flexible. Whatever hardware stuff it was doing for the audio, I’m sure we can do it in software, but I haven’t found any other apps that do it so far.
I do software by trade but haven’t done anything with audio processing, so that part of it would be a new world for me, but the rest would be nbd. Definitely interested in contributing to that type of project.
UltraStar Deluxe (https://github.com/UltraStar-Deluxe/USDX) is a thing… open source and whatnot. I’ve downloaded it a few times but it seems complicated and not super intuitive so I’ve never actually used it.
I think UltraStar Creator (https://github.com/UltraStar-Deluxe/UltraStar-Creator) lets you create karaoke songs.
for the videomaking you can transcribe the lyrics into a subtitle file using whatever timestamp system those use (or metadata encoded in more advanced video formats)
for ripping the vocals out, you can’t un-bake a cake so you have to find stems or isolated parts of the tracks somewhere. maybe there’s “ai” tools or running something like nvidia’s “rtx voice” backwards but i wouldn’t expect any of that tech to be very good.
I’ve used Aegisub to make fancy .ASS format subtitle files which you can then bake into the video using ffmpeg. Probably the easiest free solution. In Aegisub you can import the audio and then visually plot out the karaoke stables over a spectrogram of the audio. It’s pretty easy and there is a lot of flexibility with the text formatting.
Also can we take a moment real quick to pour one out for Twitch Sings.
Best free consumer grade karaoke software I’ve ever used (made by Harmonix no less) with a really strong library of tracks. Super good experience even if you never actually stream with it - we used to use it for house parties all the time and only occasionally live streamed our intoxicated debauchery onto the internet. A lot of those moments still get referenced in our friend group frequently, though sadly the actual vods got killed when they pulled the plug on the service a couple years back, so they live only in our collective memories now, as we lacked the collective foresight to archive them first.
Really wish they would have let that live a little longer or bring it back, but obviously the licensing for all that music is certainly a nightmare (it had tons of disney stuff and Beatles tracks, wish they could have just rotated that stuff out at least).
