Sing Along With Your PC

By Team Digit | Updated on 01-Oct-2006

01-Oct-2006

There are more closet singers amongst us than you might imagine: some sing out aloud when no-one’s around, and some, of course, do it in the happy privacy of their bathrooms. Such folks generally like the idea of Karaoke, and would do well to check out the software we’re about to talk about-vanBasco’s Karaoke Player, a freeware application. Naturally, you’ll also need a microphone and speakers if you want to sing along with your PC.

The software can be found at www.vanbasco.com-it’s a small download, at 864 KB. The program plays MIDI and Karaoke files and also displays the lyrics embedded within the file. Thus, it is possible for this program to not only play the music, but also view the lyrics in synch.

Step 1
Go to www.vanbasco.com/midisearch.html and type the title of a song or the name of an artist into the Search box. Check the box labelled “Only results with Karaoke Lyrics”, then hit the Search button. Here, you can find hits such as Nikita by Elton John, Yesterday by The Beatles and even In The End by Linkin Park!

Step2
Start the Karaoke Player program. In the Playlist window, use the right pane to browse for the file you downloaded. Select it, then click the Add button to add it to the playlist in the left pane.

Step 3
Play the song by selecting it in the Playlist window and then clicking the Play button in the Karaoke Player window. As the song plays, the notes will appear on the keyboard in the Piano window.

Step 4
The lyrics appear in the Karaoke window (the one with the pale blue background). Click and drag this window to the middle of your screen to make it easier to read. Right-click it and choose Full Screen to make it larger-right-click it again to shrink it.

Step 5
You can change the way the lyrics appear by right-clicking the Lyric window and choosing Options. Click the Karaoke tab, then use the drop-down lists to alter the settings. Click OK when you’re done.

Step 6
To alter the tempo and key of the song to suit your voice, use the sliders in the Control window. Click the Reset button to cancel any changes you make here.

Step 7
You can silence a particular instrument in the MIDI Output window by clicking the red button by its name. To hear that instrument on its own, click the grey button.

Here are some tips to work better with vanBasco’s Karaoke Player. For fullscreen Karaoke, either double-click inside the Karaoke window or choose “Full Screen” from the Karaoke window’s context menu (right-click inside the Karaoke window to open the context menu). You can drag and drop files onto vanBasco’s Karaoke Player from file managers like Windows Explorer. If your files sound wrong, try setting the SYSEX delay in the setup dialog to a value greater than 30. If you encounter hanging notes during fast-forward or when pressing the Pause button, please enable “Reset On Pause”. To do Karaoke while running other apps, check “Always On Top” in the Karaoke window’s context menu (click inside Karaoke window with right mouse button). Choosing the Scan mode (click on SCAN in the main window) is handy for trying multiple files. You can specify the scan interval in the setup dialog. You can quickly navigate to a particular song in the current playlist using the quick select window (in the main program window, click the file name or press ‘Q’ on your computer’s keyboard).

Now that your personal Karaoke machine is ready, you can tweak and perfect (or try to perfect) your singing in private before you treat your family and friends to a rendition of your all-time-favourites. And please remember-if you’ve got a song in your heart, you’ve got to make a start

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