A brief description of how to make your own karaoke video

By utilising your previously downloaded or created instrumental audio file in a standard (freely available download of course) video creator or editor it is possible to make your own simple karaoke version of the tune.

To make karaoke however you should be sure to only use an instrumental version of the song. To get your instrumental song file you can either use one you already have on your hard-drive or an audio CD, download one from the internet, or use a midi file.

A good and safe way to get a good quality audio mp3 or wav file to use I suggest you take the audio from an online music video; download the selected music video using SpeedBit Video Downloader and then convert or extract the audio section of the video using a suitable converter such as Any Video Converter or Freez flv to mp3 converter, all available as totally free downloads – exactly what you expect from ‘Media Bandit’, free stuff! My 1st media ebook explains exactly how to do this.

Alternatively use a free midi file or one you’ve created yourself using perhaps the method explained briefly in a couple of earlier blog posts (see here and here). 

To get free midi files my favourite method is to use VanBasco which gives you access to thousands of totally free midi downloads – they also have a very user-friendly kar player you can grab for free. Once at their site just type the name of the tune you want into the search bar and you will be confronted with a list of available versions of your desired tune, click on the one you want and once directed to the source just right click and select ‘save target as’ to download the midi song to your hard-drive, it only takes a second or so.

Alternatively search for the title of your desired midi tune followed by the suffix mid or midi using a good search engine. Once found right click and ‘save target as’ as mentioned before, or click the download button in some cases.

If your instrumental audio is not already in wav or mp3 format but is in midi format you will in most cases need to convert it to use it with a video creator or editor. To do this I recommend using ‘Switch Audio File converter’, go to http://www.nch.com.au/switch/index.html and click on ‘Download the free version’. This will easily convert your midi file to an mp3, wav or almost any format you like.

A good free video editor or creator can easily be found on all recent ‘Windows’ platforms – I think it’s available with ‘Windows XP’ and later versions and is simply called ‘Windows Movie Maker’.



VideoPad video editor

 If however you would rather try a different editor or creator or you don’t have ‘Windows Movie Maker’ on your PC then I suggest VideoPad Video Editor from ‘NCH software’, this is actually a free trial version that I have found to be the easiest to use in my opinion and I highly recommend it. The only drawback with this however is that after the trial period it locks you out if you don’t pay for the full version, but you can get around this but I don’t think it is wise to explain how here; please email me at prenterprises2010@gmail.com if you would like to know.

Once you have your video creator or editor and your instrumental audi file you can add background images or video clips, add sequenced lyrics so as the performer knows what to sing, then save it all as a video file on your PC. You can then convert it if you wish to an alternative format for use in your playback equipment, Any Video Converter as mentioned earlier will do this for you.

The basic step-by-step process involves:



Finding or creating your own background images or video clips

Inserting your clips or images into the video creator or editor in the right sequence

Removing or muting any audio in the video clips and then adding your own audio file

Changing the duration of the images or clips to appear in sequence at the right time with the music

Adding the lyrics into the visual part of your video; if you don’t know the lyrics then do a lyric search in Google

Previewing and saving your completed masterpiece karaoke video for later useDon’t worry, it may sound complicated but is quite easy once you’ve got the hang of the basic controls of the video creator/editor. It is quite time-consuming however and you will need to pay attention to detail or it could all go drastically wrong, but if you have saved all your original source files you can always scrap it and start again.

Of course you could also record your own singing voice into it if you think you are talented enough. One distinct advantage of a decent free video editor/creator is that if your singing is a bit rough you can always mute or remove it from the finished video.