Karaoke is a popular activity at parties. You don’t need much for it: a screen, an audio file in which the vocals are missing, and text that comes along at the right time. In this article, we’ll teach you how to turn your favorite song into a professional karaoke version. So you can sing unabashedly.
Karaoke means “empty orchestra” in Japanese. This means an audio file in which the vocals are missing. Nowadays, singing along is also popular with us at parties and in bars. In addition to special karaoke devices, many people use the PC as a karaoke machine. It already contains all the necessary hardware, so you only need a microphone and playback software. Let’s get started!
Collection
Karaoke usually includes purpose-recorded material that closely resembles the original hit. It will cost you a few euros per song. As a result, building a nice collection quickly becomes a hassle. Although there have been technical tricks for years to filter vocals from existing music, the quality of these is lacking. But today artificial intelligence comes to the rescue. With this you can often get the vocals almost perfectly from existing songs. This gives you the real music and no fake surrogate sounds.
No guarantee
Commercial karaoke music sometimes includes background vocals in addition to the instrumental part. Artificial intelligence is not yet smart enough to distinguish these from lead vocals and so all voices are removed.
So does your favorite song have backing vocals? Then you need some extra people for your performance to take care of those vocals. Apart from that, it can happen that in a few cases the artificial intelligence does not interpret the music correctly. Fortunately, processing an audio file takes very little time, so you just have to give it a try.
Formats
- In addition to audio, karaoke requires text that appears on a screen in sync with the music. You can do that with regular video, but when your favorite song is too high or too low for your voice range, you have a problem. Karaoke software offers the advantage that it allows you to make the played music sound higher or lower without loss of quality. This way you can always adjust it perfectly to your voice. In that case, two separate files are usually used: mp3 for audio and cdg for text.
Although a lot of music is for sale in this format, there is a good chance that you just want to sing something that does not have a karaoke version. That is why we are also going to make our own ‘orchestral band’ with lyrics.
Source: favorite song
Already have your favorite song available on the hard drive as an mp3, wav, ogg or flac file? Then skip this step. If you don’t have that yet, you need a CD with the desired recording on it. From that you then have to rip the favorite song that we are going to edit.
Specialized software has been available for ripping music from CDs for many years. If you are used to working with such software, now is the time to put the disc in the player and run that program. If you don’t have any special ripping software, you don’t need to install anything, because Windows Media Player can do it too.
To rip, put the CD in the player and choose in the explorer for Play. If you use another media player that opens the disc, you can also open the corresponding folder, right-click on the desired audio track and choose To open with to then Media Player to select.
Now click on the icon at the top right Switch to Library. Remove all check marks by clicking the top check mark and then put a check mark next to the song you want to rip. Click on the triangle next to Rip Settings and choose More options. Adjust the slider Audio quality on Best quality and click OK. Finally click Ripping CD.
You will find the created mp3 in the folder after some time Music. If Windows Media Player has found an artist and title itself, you will find it here and otherwise the folders are called Artist Unknown and Album Unknown. You can give the MP3 the correct name there yourself.
Divide
Now that we have the audio source in mp3 format, it’s time to split vocals and background. For that purpose, music service Deezer developed Slaater in 2019, an open source program that can do this job through artificial intelligence.
Because using this takes some effort, some enthusiasts developed SplitterGUI that facilitates the process. We download that program here. Its installation does not provide any particulars.
After installation, you will find SplitGUI in the Start menu. After opening, you just need to specify a path where the split files should be saved. After that, you can drag the newly created audio file into the window of SpliterGUI and, depending on the speed of your PC, you will find the final product in the specified folder within a few minutes.
The program can also process multiple files in succession via the button Or select music file(s). In addition, you can Parts to separate possibly break down music even further to also isolate things like bass and drums. That’s interesting if you’re a musician and want to play along.
Folder contents
In the specified folder you will find a new folder with the name of the processed track, in our case ‘What a nice day’ by Raymond van het Groenewoud, which we want to work with. In that folder you will find two wav files called Accompaniment and Vocals. We play the first one in its entirety to see if we like the result.
As we said in the box ‘No guarantee’, the result can occasionally be disappointing. You will sometimes notice that the music sounds just a fraction duller when the is removed. You could polish that up with a free audio editor like OcenAudio or Audacity, but that’s a workshop in itself. We are satisfied with this material.
Text
Now, of course, we need the lyrics. Fortunately, there are hundreds of thousands of them roaming the internet, so if your favorite karaoke song isn’t too obscure, you’re bound to find it. We google ‘What a nice day Groenewoud text’ and it immediately appears in its entirety as the first search result.
We copy the text, open notepad, paste the text into it and save the file under the title of the song in the folder where our music is located. If the text is really not to be found, you could possibly scan the album cover or CD booklet if the text is there. You still have to process that with an OCR program, which often only works flawlessly if the text is set in a clear font. Retyping the text yourself is therefore usually faster.
To convert
We now have the music in wav format after splicing with SspliterGUI, but we need an mp3. If you have a converter, you can use that. We prefer File Converter which can convert all kinds of files via the context menu of explorer.
The installation is simple. Once installed, navigate to the folder containing the wav file, right click on it and choose File Converter, To mp3. The job is quickly done and the mp3 appears in the same folder.
‘Karaokize’
We now need to mold the saved text file into a form usable for karaoke. For this we use the program Karaoke Lyrics Editor which can be found at www.tiny.cc/karaokelyrics. Unzip the zip file in a folder of your choice and start the program in that folder Karlyriceditor.exe.
click on New Project / Next / Next / Browse. Open the mp3 file with the original music (ie with vocals!) and fill in the other details if necessary.
Click again Next and on Finish. Give the project a title and click Save. Open the lyrics txt file and copy it to the Karaoke Lyrics Editor window. Finally, place the cursor at the beginning of the first sentence.
Time codes
Via time codes, the karaoke software will soon know when text should appear on the screen. Karaoke Lyrics Editor makes it very easy to apply. Start the music and hold your finger over the F5 key. If it’s a favorite song of yours, you’re probably already singing along in your mind. Tap F5 just before the first sentence is sung and immediately again when it’s done. Repeat this process until the end of the song.
If the downloaded lyrics are not completely accurate, you can make changes afterwards, among other things, delete time codes and split lines. Also make sure that there is a blank line between each line to be sung. Save the project.
Swap trick
With a click on Validate Lyrics you can test whether there are problems, for example in the form of too much text per screen. If so, then you need to split lines (F11).
If everything is ok, click Test Lyrics. Does the karaoke appear on screen as desired? Then it’s time for the big switch trick.
Close Karaoke Lyrics Editor and rename the original MP3 file by putting ‘original’ in front of the name for example. Now copy the file without vocals to that same folder, making sure the title is the same as the original. Now open Karaoke Lyrics Editor again and when you test you will find that you now have real karaoke.
Export
Finally, we still need to export our work in the desired form. Through Project / Export lyric file you can create an UltraStar file to host singing competitions with the program of the same name. Pure karaoke you make Project / Export CD+G file. Here you can set things like text size and color.
If you are satisfied, write with OK the cdg file. Together with the accompanying mp3 you can make a CD for certain devices, but on the PC you can also open them with Karafun Player, one of the best free karaoke programs.
Don’t need to be able to change the pitch or tempo with a karaoke player? Then you can also save your file as video (Project / Export video).
Making karaoke may seem like a complex process, but you’ll find that it all goes really fast when you get a little proficient at it. Nothing stands in the way of building a beautiful collection. Have fun singing!
