If you’re a fan of singing along to your favorite songs on your computer, then you’re in luck! There are a number of ways to turn your Ubuntu box into a karaoke machine. This easy guide will show you how. First, we’ll need to install the karaoke software. You can find it on the Ubuntu Software Center or in the repositories. Once installed, open up the application and click on the “Add Karaoke Machine” button. Next, we’ll need to choose which songs we want to karaoke. You can either choose all of the songs from the Ubuntu Software Center or select a specific song from a playlist. Once you’ve chosen a song, click on the “Add Song” button and enter its lyrics into the text field. Now that we’ve added our song, we need to create an account and set up some settings. You can do this by clicking on “Account” in the top left corner of the screen and then clicking on “Create Account.” After creating an account, click on “Settings” in the top right corner and then click on “Karaoke.” In this section, you’ll need to set up some basic settings such as how many songs you want to karaoke at once and how long each song should last for. You can also choose whether or not you want to add commentary tracks (if desired). Click on “OK” when finished setting up your account and karaoke will start working!
OSD Lyrics displays your music lyrics onto your screen when you play music. At the time of writing this article OSD lyrics is supported by Amarok 2.0 and 1.4, Audacious, Banshee, Exaile (Both 0.2 and 0.3), JuK new!^, MOC 2.5, Qmmp, Quod Libet, MPD, Rhythmbox, Songbird, and XMMS2.
Installing OSD Lyrics
Open your terminal and type in the following command. Remember to hit ‘enter’ for each command to execute them.
followed by..
OSD Lyrics will be installed under ‘Applications’ > ‘Sound and Video’ > ‘OSD Lyrics’.
Showing Lyrics
OSD Lyrics displays lyrics on your desktop. OSD Lyrics will be minimized in your task bar after you open it. We can access OSD menu by left clicking the OSD icon in our task bar. An interesting observation that I notice in Ubuntu 10.04 is that we can’t start OSD lyrics before starting our music player.
We need to download the lyrics for the songs we play. Open the ‘Search Lyrics’ screen by selecting the ‘Search Lyrics’ option from the menu. Select different lyrics provider from the drop down list if you cant find the lyric that you are looking for.
Click the download button to store the lyrics file into your local drive.
OSD Lyrics will automatically assign the lyric and the song we are playing in our music player. OSD Lyrics will immediately display the lyrics on the bottom screen after we download the lyrics.
Configuring OSD Lyrics
We can adjust OSD Lyrics display on our desktop. Just click ‘Preferences’ on OSD Lyrics menu. In this screen we can adjust the lyric’s font type, size, and color.
Conclusion
OSD Lyrics is a good Ubuntu software that we can use to transform our Linux box into a karaoke machine. The last thing we need is to get a microphone and connect your Linux box to some decent speaker, and now you’re ready to use your Linux box as a karaoke machine.
