Version 2 of the first MIDI Karaoke player for Pocket PC has been released. Click here to download it.

MIDI Karaoke is the first computer karaoke file format. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Basically it is a standard that allows various electronic musical instruments to communicate. Your computer's soundcard has a MIDI synthesizer that can produce sounds based on the information stored in a MIDI file. This information is similar to what is in the sheet music, like what notes need to be played and which instruments need to be used. A MIDI file does not contain any recorded sounds, it only contains the instructions on how to perform the sounds. It's up to the MIDI synsthesizer to interpret those instructions and produce the sound. What this means is that the quality of MIDI karaoke highly depends on the quality of the MIDI synthesizer. If you use MIDI karaoke, you need to make sure that your computer sound card has a good quality MIDI synthesizer. If you are more experienced in MIDI, you may also use an external MIDI synthesizer like a keyboard or a MIDI sound module connected to a MIDI interface of your computer.

A MIDI Karaoke file is just a regular MIDI file which in addition to the musical information has the song lyrics stored in it. When the file is played by a MIDI Karaoke player, the lyrics are displayed in synch with the music. MIDI Karaoke files usually have .kar extension, although they may also have standard .mid extension. I prefer to name all my MIDI Karaoke files with .kar extension so that I can identify them as MIDI files with lyrics as opposed to the ones without.

Pros of MIDI Karaoke:

File sizes are very small because the files do not contain any recorded audio data.

The files can be easily shared via internet because of their small size. There are thousands of MIDI karaoke files available on the internet.

Song key and tempo can be easily changed. The player program just modifies the music information stored in the file before sending it to the MIDI synthesizer on the fly as the file is being played back.

The instrument playing the melody of the song can be easily muted.

Cons of MIDI Karaoke

Since the sound is produced by a MIDI synthesizer, it is not as authentic as real instruments. Some songs may sound very computerish.

Since MIDI files do not contain any recorded sound, it is impossible to have the background vocals.

The best MIDI Karaoke player program for Windows is KaraWin.

You can download MIDI Karaoke songs from here.
You can also download Russian MIDI Karaoke songs from here.

.Kar MIDI Karaoke files are nothing more than the standard midi files with song lyrics entered as text events. This file format has been introduced by a company Tune 1000 in the early 90's. They since have abandoned that format, but there are plenty of independent .kar file producers out there who have made thousands of files.

To see the format of the .kar files, load them into your favorite sequencing software that allows looking at the MIDI events. If you don't have one, you can <a href=http://journals.rpungin.fotki.com/midi/entry/wfdrwsggbk/>;downlaod an old version of Cakewalk</a> for Windows. If your software does not recognize .kar files as MIDI files, just rename them to .mid.

Now let's look at the file format. The first track contains text events that are used to make the file recognizable by the Soft Karaoke program as the MIDI Karaoke file. @KMIDI KARAOKE FILE is used to for that purpose. @V0100 is the program version number. Anything starting with @I is any information you want to include in the file, such as the song name and the artist.

The second track contains the text events for the lyrics of the song. The first event is @LENGL. It identifies the language the words are in, which is English. The next couple of events start with @T which identifies the title of the songs. You can have up to three events like these. The text of those events will show up in the upper right corner of the Soft Karaoke program window.

The rest of the track contains the words of the song. Each event is the syllable that is supposed to be sung at the time of the event. If the text starts with \, it means to clear the screen and show the words at the top of the screen. If the text starts with /, it means to go to the next line.

From 1994 through 1997 I have been spending a lot of my time creating MIDI Karaoke files. This started since I have discovered Soft Karaoke software. So far I have created more than 220 files. By creating I do not necessarily mean that I sequenced the MIDI file. I just converted existing MIDI files to the .KAR format by adding lyrics to them. However I have sequenced some MIDI files myself and also adjusted some of the existing files to sound better.

Download Now (Raphael'sKarFiles.zip 2.6MB)