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Preface A: What is Competitive Karaoke?

Overview

Chances are, if you're here and following this tutorial, you already have a general idea of what competitive karaoke is -- maybe you played the SingStar games back in the day, or maybe you saw some karaoke software running at a convention or meetup or whatever and got curious. Regardless of your background, this section serves as a 'background' of what competitive karaoke is, how it differs from normal karaoke, and the open source software that exists around competitive karaoke.

A competitive karaoke game is a game where players have to sing on-key to gain points. The person with the highest score wins. This concept started out in Japan with systems like Karaoke JOYSOUND and LiveDAM, but was soon exported to the West in 2004 with the Sony SingStar series. From that point, tens of games were released -- many region-exclusive -- for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, before the game was unceremoniously discontinued in January 2020. From that point on, simulators became the main way to play competitive karaoke.

Notably, this means that competitive karaoke (SingStar, JOYSOUND/DAM, and the like) is distinct from those karaoke videos you might see on YouTube or from Karafun or at a bar or whatever. Those don't give you points! They're not competitive, and that's no fun.

But, of course, this also means that competitive karaoke requires a bit more effort than a karaoke video to make. You have to time each individual note correctly and ensure that each note has the correct pitch -- otherwise players will be frustrated by a low quality chart, just like they would for any other rhythm game.

For our purposes, crowd-sourced competitive karaoke is based on the UltraStar format, named after the original SingStar simulator. This means that, for the most part, an UltraStar chart can be used in any other SingStar simulator and each game will parse them seamlessly. A few of the actively developed games are linked below:

List of games

  • UltraStar Deluxe
    • My Little Karaoke: While branded as a 'separate' game, it is actually effectively a song pack and theme for UltraStar Deluxe. You can run My Little Karaoke's theme and song pack on a newer installation of UltraStar Deluxe by copying over the song, theme, and avatar folders, with some modifications.
  • UltraStar Play / Melody Mania
    • Melody Mania is the paid equivalent of UltraStar Play and includes some extra song creation / vocal isolation features, acting as a way to support the developers of UltraStar Play.
  • Vocaluxe
  • Tune Perfect
  • UltraStar WorldParty
    • This is a fork of UltraStar Deluxe, most notable for its integrated online scoreboard
    • Note that this game has opted not to use the updated UltraStar format, which means that compatibility may break with songs made in the future
  • Support is also possibly eventually planned for the multi-rhythm game engines YARG and Project OutFox.

You are ultimately free to pick whichever game you'd like, but I would personally recommend UltraStar Deluxe as it's the most consistently developed and fully featured, in my opinion. Thus, I'll be using it throughout this tutorial. Of course, since the format is portable, you can use your charts in whatever game you choose.

Next steps

You can learn a little bit about the UltraStar TXT format and the ways to edit it, or skip straight to creating a song.

<< Back to the beginning >> Continue to Preface B: The UltraStar Format and Editors

>> Skip to Part 1: Audio

Quick navigation: Index / Preface A / Preface B / Part 1: Audio / Part 2: Lyrics / Part 3: BPM / Part 4: Tapping / Part 5: Finetuning / Part 6: Pitching / Part 7: Golden Notes / Part 8: Testing