Computer Karaoke for the Home User

If you've been out singing karaoke in bars and other venues you have undoubtedly noticed that some karaoke hosts are no longer using discs and a disc player to run their shows. Instead they are looking at a laptop's screen and adding songs with a mouse or the keyboard. Yes, computer karaoke is taking over the professional scene and making life much easier for the modern KJ. No longer do they have the discs to store and handle and the karaoke software lets them do things not possible with a disc player.

These days many people have a karaoke sound system in their home and often have hundreds of discs. Just like the pro KJ they know how much of a hassle the discs can be. There is no good reason why the home user should not take advantage of this technology. Lets take a look at what you would be getting into.

You might be concerned that you will need a very powerful laptop with expensive sound and video cards. This is not the case at all. In fact, some hosting software programs will run fine on computers built 8 or 10 years ago. If your Windows laptop (karaoke software for Mac computers is scarce) has the extended desktop feature (most do), and at least 64 MB of video ram, you can turn it into a karaoke machine. The integrated sound card will work fine.

Now here's the part that is not very enjoyable and may require a good bit of your time. You will need to rip all the songs from your karaoke CDG discs to either the laptop's hard drive or an external USB hard drive. If you have hundreds of discs this will take you quite awhile to accomplishment. Figure 3 to 4 minutes per song (not per disc) and you will have an idea. Just keep telling yourself that you only need to do this once and then will never need to handle the discs again. You will need a good CDG ripping program that will rip the song tracks directly to zipped MP3+G files. I recommend Power CD+G Burner.

Once you have all the songs on the hard drive you will use a karaoke hosting application to create a database from the files that can be searched by title and/or artist. It will then play the song files and has features like digital key change, singer history, singer rotation, next singer display, filler music, etc.. The program JustKaraoke is perfect for the home user because it requires very little system resources and is very easy to learn to use. The remote monitor support (uses the extended desktop feature of the laptop) allows you to display the karaoke on a separate monitor while displaying the workstation on the laptop. Just like the pros do it.

So what you are basically doing is replacing your karaoke disc player with the laptop. You will connect the laptop to the sound system with an adapter cable that has a 1/8" stereo plug on one end and dual RCA connections on the other. It will run from the earphone jack of the laptop to the audio inputs of the sound system. You will use a standard VGA cable to connect the laptop to a remote monitor. Connecting to a TV will depend on the connection options it offers.