Karaoke

Karaoke is one of our consistently most-visited activities and is organized on the evening of every 3rd Friday (check our agenda). For this we use our own fork of the purpose-made software Performous. Like this, we can replicate the experience one would get in one of the many Karaoke joints in Japan.

A screenshot of Performous while playing a song
A screenshot of Performous.
Of note are the individually split notes / syllables / morae and the highlighting of the currently active / sung word "wa".

This does require us to "time" our songs specifically for Performous, meaning we will not always have every song. Luckily, with currently over 7000 songs timed and ready to sing, there is definitely something for everyone. You can check out our database in the quick links section below.

Timing tutorial

If there is a song you feel is missing from the database, fret not — you can change that!

Software required

Once all 3 are installed, we can move on to...

Files needed

  • The audio for the song
  • The lyrics of the song
Optional and can be added later:
  • A video to show as a background video while singing
  • A cover picture
  • A background picture

Put all of these files together into one, otherwise empty folder for USC to detect.

Preparing to time

The lyrics of the song have to be formatted in a certain way for USC to see where to split the syllables you will later tell it when to play.

  • Between every word there is a space ' '
  • Between every syllable there is a '+'
  • When a single syllable stretches across beats, or changes pitch, denote this using tildes '~'.
  • Lines should neither be too long, nor too short. You'll get a feel for this in no time.

Following all of these rules will lead to your lyrics looking somewhat like this:

lyrics.txt Na+mi+da na+ga+shi+na+ga+ra ta+~+chi+a+gat+te
Ta+ta+kau

...which will end up looking like this once we're done:

Example of the use of a tilde to "extend" a note
The above lyrics; in Performous
Note the tilde (~), which we use to indicate that our example song changes pitch mid-way through the syllable "ta"
This will now more clearly read what is really sung, which goes more like "ta-↗a-chi-a-ga-tte".

Actually timing

Now that everything is in place, we can open up Ultrastar-Creator.

The Ultrastar-Creator interface with all the information filled in

The very first thing you will have to do is to press the "Browse..." button in the top left. You will then have to navigate to the folder you just created and select the audio file (usually .mp3) for the song.

Once that is done, you can start filling in all the details. USC will automatically fill the Title and Artist fields, but they may be wrong so please double-check those. The same is true for the BPM field — USC tries its best to figure out the BPM from the file, but sometimes it will get it wrong and make it very annoying for us to time. Try to verify this value with something like a BPM tapper while you're listening to the song.

Use the Edition field to add extra information about the song. Possibly it is the OP or ED of an anime (and perhaps it's the TV length version); maybe it is part of the soundtrack of a video game; or perhaps it's a cover / parody of another song. All of these are useful bits of information for others to more easily find the song they're looking for!

Fill in your name under the Creator field, since you'll also be able to find songs you timed yourself during Uta-jin! ( •̀ ω •́ )

Refining

Unfortunately, if you were to open up Performous right now and try out your newly timed song, things would still be quite off.
[compare unrefined vs refined song gif]