Karaoke Anything!

Karaoke Anything is a Windows program that can turn your music collection into a karaoke library.

The usual karaoke software and equipment require songs that have been specifically formatted and sold as karaoke songs. Karaoke Anything, on the other hand, wants to overcome that limitation by playing normal songs in a karaoke mode. It does this by identifying the song, pairing it with lyrics from its database and suppressing the voice track. It can do all of this on the fly as well.

Karaoke songs come with all of the information needed to be played in karaoke fashion. Normal songs don’t, necessarily. A song may have incorrect or incomplete meta information, or Karaoke Anything may simply not have the song in its database. It does have most English songs at least, but if you want to listen to songs with non-English lyrics, you’re likely out of luck.

In order to remove the vocals from a song, Karaoke Anything has a built-in equalizer that minimizes that track or those tracks so that they’re not audible. This mechanism is pretty good at doing that on the fly. If you’re playing music from a retail CD, you’ll notice consistent performance, usually. With an MP3 collection or self-made CDs, performance can be a bit more inconsistent. You may have to fiddle with a particular song to get it just right.

When Karaoke Anything is working well, it’s a pretty impressive program that can provide you a lot of fun and help save a lot of money. It’s certainly worth taking out for a test spin, but be mindful that the program can sometimes result in more work than the average user will care for. Turn any party into a karaoke party, but it may not be much of a party if you have to keep fiddling with each song.

Pros

• Turn most songs into karaoke songs
• Works with MP3s and CDs

Cons

• Doesn’t recognize all songs
• Can require fiddling on a per-song basis