For years an absolute champion named CC created great karaoke tracks and kept a Mega archive updated monthly. The Mega link is dead now. If anyone knows a new location I’d appreciate a tip.
CC if you are reading this, and it’s all over, thanks for the good times. Your work was epic, and you really helped my karaoke parties.
Kinda related question: What system are you using? Is it FOSS by chance?
I’ve been using Pikaraoke, which is FOSS, can run on a Raspberry pi, and using yt-dlp can add songs to the library from youtube on the fly. I’ve been very happy with it.
I have used Karaoke Eternal before. It does work but you need to use a laptop or something as powerful or else it just studders.
This looked promising but I was quickly disappointed… You cannot pick a library path on another volume. Drat. Still worth a bookmark, thanks for mentioning it.
I’ve tried a bunch of karaoke software including trials of the commercial products. So far my favorite for house parties is Karafun for Windows. You need to dig up the v2 edition. They REMOVED the ability to play your own files in the new v3.
https://www.karafun.com/karaokeplayer/
Karafun isn’t perfect, it can act up if you have a large library… Even freezing or crashing. But that generally happens at startup or shutdown, not during use. Imperfect as it is, it’s still the best I have found.
We do serious parties, if I could pay someone for awesome karaoke software I would totally do it, but all the commercial versions are really hateful to use. (I guess I should take another look, it’s been a couple of years.)
Edit to add:
I just re-tried Kanto Karaoke, it looks so promising… But as with every app I have tried it has some usability issues that are fairly devastating, for me anyway. I think it is worth a look if you are exploring the free and affordable options, though.