How to run a karaoke night at home from a PC

What you actually need

Less than people expect. A computer, a microphone, something to look at, and songs. Everything past that is refinement, and most of the kit sold for this is aimed at a problem you do not have in a living room.

• A microphone. Any one. This is the bit people get wrong by spending too much.
• A screen everyone can see. A telly is better than a monitor, purely because people can sit down.
• Sound that is not coming out of the laptop. The one upgrade that genuinely changes the evening.
• Songs people actually want to sing. The whole thing lives or dies here.

The microphone

A karaoke game is listening for pitch. It wants to know which note you are landing on, not how warm your voice sounds. That is a much easier job than recording, which is why a fifteen pound USB mic, a gaming headset, a webcam or the microphone already in your laptop will all work.

Where it is worth spending a little: a mic on a stand or in your hand is better than one built into a laptop, because it hears you rather than the room, the telly and everyone talking. That is the actual difference, and it is a difference in isolation, not in quality.

Two mics beats one if you want duets or a handover that does not involve wrestling. Two cheap ones beat one expensive one every single time for this.

The screen and the sound

Run an HDMI cable to the telly and set it as the display. Everyone can see the lyrics, nobody is crowded round a desk, and the person singing can stand up, which matters more than it sounds.

For sound, anything other than laptop speakers. A soundbar, the telly's own speakers, a bluetooth speaker, an old hi-fi. Laptop speakers are quiet enough that people sing quietly, and quiet singing is bad singing.

The thing nobody warns you about: delay

This is the single most common reason a home karaoke setup feels broken, and people almost always blame themselves or the microphone.

Sound takes time to get from the computer to the telly and back from your mouth to the microphone. Over HDMI, a television doing its own picture processing can add a surprising amount. The result is that you sing exactly in time, and the game marks you as consistently late, on every single note, all night.

Every serious rhythm or karaoke game has a calibration for this, and it is worth two minutes before anybody arrives. In FullVolume there is a button that sorts it out on its own, or you can tap along for a few bars and let it work you out. If you use something else, find its audio offset or latency setting and do the same.

If the scoring suddenly feels unfair for everyone, it is this. It is basically always this.

Where the songs come from

The part that decides whether this happens twice. There are three approaches and they suit different people.

Pay for a catalogue

Karafun, Singa and similar charge monthly and hand you a large licensed library. You never think about files. If the idea of assembling songs sounds like a chore you will not do, this is the honest answer and the fee is the price of not caring.

Assemble a free library

UltraStar Deluxe and Vocaluxe use community charted song files that people have been making for twenty years. Free, enormous, and you build the collection yourself. Budget an afternoon the first time.

Use one you already have

If anyone in the house has played Clone Hero or collected Rock Band customs, the songs are already downloaded and already charted, vocals included, and the guitar games simply never play that part. That library is a karaoke library and nobody ever told you. If not, the Marketplace here lists over 40,000 free charts that have a vocal part in them.

Running the actual night

1. Set it up before anyone arrives

   Screen, sound, mic, calibration, and scan your songs in. A library scan in front of an impatient room is a bad start, and it only ever has to happen once.

2. Queue songs instead of choosing between them

   The night dies in the gaps. If people can line up the next few while somebody is still singing, it runs itself. If everyone has to crowd round and browse after each song, you get three minutes of nothing every three minutes.

3. Start with something everybody knows

   The first song sets whether this is a laugh or a performance. Something universally known and slightly stupid gets more people up than something impressive.

4. Turn the difficulty down as the night goes on

   An easier setting widens how close to the note you have to be. Later on, with everyone louder and less accurate, that is the difference between a scoreboard people enjoy and one that just tells them they are bad.

5. Let people sing low

   Most songs are written for a voice that is not in the room. A game that scores you the same for singing an octave down means nobody has to sit out because the song is too high, which is otherwise the most common reason people stop joining in.

If everyone is not in the same house

Video calls are genuinely bad at this. Every call app is built to suppress background noise, duck people who are not talking, and prioritise speech over music, which is a precise description of everything you do not want. Add the call latency and singing together is impossible.

What works is everybody running the same game and it keeping time between them, with voice chat for the bit in between songs. FullVolume does that with rooms: one person hosts, you send round the name, and everyone's score is on screen at once.