Your Clone Hero library already has the vocals in it

The short version

Three things are true at once, and together they are better news than they sound.

• Clone Hero has no vocals, and is not getting them. Its own FAQ says the game entered long term support at 1.0.4080 and that "any new major features, such as new instruments, are not planned". What it plays is 5 fret guitar, 6 fret guitar, 4 lane drums and Pro Drums.
• Your charts have the vocals in them regardless. The format has carried a PART VOCALS track all along, holding the lead line and the lyrics, and very often HARM2 and HARM3 for the harmonies underneath it.
• So the singing is already on your drive, in the folder you already point Clone Hero at, in songs you already downloaded, and the game you play them with is never going to open that part of the file.

That is the whole point of this page. You do not need to download your library again, convert anything, hunt for "karaoke versions" of songs you already have, or touch a single file. You need something that reads the same folder and does not throw the vocal track away.

What is actually inside a song folder

Open any song in your library and you get some arrangement of these:

• notes.mid or notes.chart - the chart itself. This is a multi track file, and each instrument is its own named track. Guitar, bass, drums, and PART VOCALS sitting there next to them.
• song.ini - the metadata. Title, artist, album, year, charter, the difficulty ratings, and which parts the chart actually contains.
• song.ogg, or a set of stems like guitar.ogg and vocals.ogg - the audio. Some charts ship one mixed file, some split it per instrument.
• album.png - the cover art, which is why your song list looks like a record shelf rather than a spreadsheet.

A .sng file is the same thing with the lid on: a single compressed container holding all of the above, which is why you cannot open one and poke about inside it. It is not a different kind of chart, just a tidier way to store one. Anything that understands the format reads straight out of it.

Why the vocals are there if nobody can sing them

Because most of these charts did not start life in Clone Hero. An enormous number of them are Rock Band customs, or conversions of them, and Rock Band had four parts including vocals. When a chart gets converted the vocal track is not stripped out, it simply comes along and then sits unused.

The charters kept charting it too. Someone sat down and placed every syllable of that song against the pitch it is sung at, with the words attached, because that is what a complete chart is. Then it got uploaded, and downloaded a few thousand times, and the only thing anybody ever did with it was play the guitar part.

There are tens of thousands of songs in this state. Fully charted vocals, freely available, already downloaded by people who have no way to hear them.

How to sing them

1. Get FullVolume

   One installer, no account, no launcher, no admin rights. It is free and there is nothing in it to buy.

2. Point it at the folder you already have

   Settings, then Library, then Add Folder. Give it the same songs folder Clone Hero uses. Add as many as you like, across as many drives as you like. Nothing is copied and nothing is modified, so Clone Hero is entirely unaffected.

3. Let it read through once

   It scans the library, tells you how it is getting on, and then remembers. A big library takes a few minutes the first time and is instant every time after that. If you add songs later, rescan.

4. Sing

   Search it, sort it, pick something. The lyrics come up, the note line runs across the screen, and holding the right pitch is what scores.

What about my Rock Band customs

Those work too, in the form you already have them. A _rb3con package is read directly, with no unpacking step and no conversion pass first. If you have been collecting customs for years, that shelf is a karaoke library that nobody ever told you was one.

Plain song folders, .sng archives and _rb3con packages can all sit in the same library at once. There is no format setting to get right, because it reads whichever it finds.

What happens to songs with nothing to sing

They are left out of the list, quietly. A chart with no PART VOCALS track is an instrumental as far as singing goes, and putting it on the menu just means somebody picks it and finds there is nothing to do.

This is worth knowing before you point it at a 5,000 song folder and see a smaller number come back. Nothing is broken. That is the count of songs somebody actually sings on.

Do I need a proper microphone

No. A USB mic, a gaming headset, a webcam mic or the one built into your laptop will all do the job. What is being measured is the pitch you are landing on, not how flattering the recording is, so cheap equipment is not the handicap you would expect it to be.

A headset is nicer in a room with other people, purely because it hears you rather than the telly. That is the only real argument for spending anything.

If your library is thin

The same two places that keep the charts also happen to be the largest free karaoke catalogue nobody has noticed. The Marketplace on this site lists every chart from Chorus Encore and Rhythmverse that has a vocal part in it, which is currently over 40,000 songs. Search it, download one, drop it in your songs folder, rescan.