Hello Cleveland.

July 16, 2009 7:17 PM

I'd like to make homemade karaoke discs ... can you help?

We've gotten back into karaoke at the local pub lately, but virtually all of the songs I want to do are unavailable from any source. I'm talking, I want to be able to sing Fairport Convention or Fear Factory or Great Lake Swimmers, stuff this is not now and never will be available on a "real" karaoke disc.

So, I'm wondering if it's possible to make homebrew karaoke discs that will play in the CD+G player at the pub. I'm imagining the process would be something like ...

1. Remove vocals from an MP3
2. Add subtitles/lyrics
3. Burn to a compatible disc for the CD+G player

Do tools for these steps - preferably open-source - exist? Furthermore, have you done this, and were you satisfied with the results? Is this legal to attempt to do? General advice or tips?

(Found this previous question, but it wasn't much help)

posted by jbickers to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

My understanding of removing vocals is that as long as the vocals are coming from both channels they can be removed with minumum loss of overall quality; if not, then you might not be able to even achieve that result. Audacity is able to do the basic vocal removal.

Maybe look on iTunes and see if they have a karaoke version available?
posted by jstarlee at 7:29 PM on July 16, 2009

You won't be able to remove the vocals to any satisfying degree.

See also.
posted by pompomtom at 8:17 PM on July 16, 2009

I have a plugin that claims to have a vocal remover. Send me a couple of mp3s and I'll give it a try. I have my doubts, but who knows?
posted by nosila at 8:19 PM on July 16, 2009

I agree with pompomtom, vocals can be supressed, but not eliminated, and in the process, any other sound that's balanced in the sound stage gets attenuated, too.

Vocals are usually placed front and center in the stereo mix, but not always. The more they are, the more you can remove.

My experiments with a variety of tunes and tools 'hollows out' the music. Not a good effect, IMO.
posted by FauxScot at 8:45 PM on July 16, 2009

Forget about being able to remove the vocals from a song. Chances are that the only thing you'll get is a headache from listening to the awful, awful results that kind of sound processing has.


I was looking for something like this some years ago and I was unable to find anything I liked. There's Karaoke CD+G Creator but it's very expensive for what it does, and it doesn't do much. Especially if you don't have the karaoke version of the songs you want.

If you want something prettier and you're a little more technically inclined you can create VideoCDs and DVDs with subtitles for the lyrics.

There are other alternatives if you have access to a computer where you want your karaoke session (netbooks rock for this kind of thing).

For example, you can try out MIDI (.KAR) files with a good software synth (like the YAMAHA XG SoftSynthesizer S-YXG50). It doesn't sound the same, depending on the instruments it can really suck, but it works.

Finally, if you don't really care about the voices, Ultrastar Deluxe is a opensource karaoke game for PC based on the Singstar series (console) and it uses normal mp3s along with videos if you add them. It sounds a lot better and it allows you to use whatever song you want if you make/download the lyrics file but it's a game, which can be both a good or a bad thing depending of what you want.
posted by Memo at 9:47 PM on July 16, 2009

There are sites that let you chose karaoke songs and put them to disk and they send you the disk.

You will be surprised whats out there. karaoke djs only really carry whats popular but that doesnt mean the companies dont put other songs out there.

I would look into these sites first.
posted by majortom1981 at 5:54 AM on July 17, 2009