The Note Editor

To karaoke a song, all you need is the music file (MP3, OGG, etc) and a corresponging note file. While SingSong comes with hundreds of note files, you can easily make your own note files with the Note Editor to karaoke any song you like.

Getting Started

When first run, the Note Editor needs a song file to be opened before it can be very useful. Click File -> Open Song and choose a song file. After some processing the song will be loaded and the Note Editor will look similar to this:

Lyrics Markers

The first step in creating a new note file is to synchronize the lyrics text with the music. This is very easy to do. Start by googling the name of your song and the word "lyrics". Once you find the lyrics, select them with the mouse, right click and choose Copy, then paste them into the Lyrics text box in the Note Editor.

The fun part is next. Play your song by clicking Play. Each time the artist sings a syllable, click the Add Marker button. For now just do the first couple sentences, then pause the music by clicking Play again.

Now is a good time to introduce the various ways to navigate a song. For big jumps, click or drag in the position slider above the black song area. For very precise positioning, hold right click in the black area and move the mouse.

Go ahead and rewind the song to take a look at the markers you have added. Each time you clicked Add Marker, a small triangular marker appeared at the bottom of the screen at that location in the music:



As you can see, the lyrics text is placed at each marker. This is done automatically by breaking the text into words at each space. This works perfectly for single syllable words, but requires a little manual editing for other words. For example, in the image above, the word "cheated" is sung as two syllables. To fix this just add a space to make the word "cheat ed". The other words are shifted to the right and the display instantly changes:



Continue until you've done the whole song. It is useful to rewind occasionally and play the song to check that your markers are in the correct place. If they are off, pause the music and drag the markers to a new position using the mouse. Double click a marker to delete it.

It doesn't take long to get the hang of. After doing a few songs, this process usually only takes 5-10 minutes.

Analyzed Notes

The second and final step of creating a new note file is to define what notes should be sung. To help with the task, the Note Editor can analyze the music and estimate what notes are being sung. To do this, click View -> Show Analyzed Notes. Green lines will appear which estimate the sung notes:



Creating new notes in the editor is pretty straightforward, but if you get stuck refer to the Manipulating notes page. Starting from the left, click in the note area to create new notes. When you are done, click again on the last note you created to stop adding new notes. The above example would then look like this:

Sung Notes

Rewind the song to the beginning, click the Record Notes button, and then click Play. As you sing the song, your notes will be recorded. When finished, click the Record Notes button again. If you rewind and record your notes multiple times, they will use a different color each time. Here you can see the analyzed notes in green, and the sung notes in red and yellow:



Because there is usually a lot of other noise going on in the music (guitars, drums, pianos, etc), SingSong isn't always able to analyze what notes are being sung. If you have an acapella (vocals only) version of the song then you can analyze that by clicking File -> Analyze Song. This allows SingSong to determine nearly every note correctly.

However, many times an acapella version of your song is not available. In this case you'll have to sing the song yourself and use a combination of the analyzed song, your own singing, and your best judgement to determine where the notes should be placed. The results are very accurate!

Finished!

Once you have your notes like you want, click File -> Save Notes and save them in the "notes" folder. Make sure your song and note files are named properly, then start SingSong and your song will appear in the song menu, ready to karaoke! Don't forget to share your note files on the forums.

Advanced Note Editing

Creating the notes for your song can be as time consuming as you like. Even without spending much time, you will get accurate results that are fun to sing and compete with. You can also spend a lot of time refining your notes until they are very, very accurate. For tips and more about note editing, see Advanced note editing.