Want to host a Church Karaoke night? I think this might be the best and cheapest way to do it!
I just love my job as Youth Pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Decatur TX. One of the reasons I love it is because of the rich traditions in Decatur. One of these is 5th Quarter. After each home High School football game, separate churches in our community take turns hosting “5th Quarter” – basically it is a church sponsored party after the Home football game! What a great idea, right! Last year we had over 200 kids show up!!
So this year I wanted to take the party up a notch and add Karaoke!
I searched high and low for a great (and cheap) system for doing Karaoke at church. Well it was difficult to find one that really worked out for what we wanted.
What I wanted was to be able to add a song, specify a singer and do this remotely from the computer where the Karaoke singer was. And I wanted the song lyrics to show on a monitor in front of the singer and ALSO have the Karaoke lyrics displayed on the projector behind the singer. That is quite a tall order – and to be honest, no Karaoke software will do all this perfectly – having two external monitors involved is a no go – and I actually had to add a small hardware component to make this work
Here is what I ended up with.
I used KaraFun as the Karaoke software. It is easy to use, has support for displaying lyrics on a second screen, has an easy to search library of 10,000 songs. You can even add your own songs if you have any CD+G songs available (are you that serious of a Karaoke fan??? I wasn’t… ).
What I did, to make this all work with my laptop, an external monitor and a projector is that I added this HDMI splitter.
This allowed me to split the HDMI video and audio signal coming from my Mac to both the external monitor and the projector. My Mac just saw this as one external monitor which was fine. I just had the lyrics window go fullscreen on this external monitor and it all worked great!
KaraFun would then allow me to queue up singers to the Karaoke playlist from the software on my Mac. But it also has this very cool feature to allow users to add THEMSELVES to the Karaoke Queue! All they do is just type in the URL displayed on the screen. They type in their name and then search or browse for a song to sing. They just add themselves as a singer for that song and BAM they are added to the queue! No human required!
We had a great time and I highly suggest this software for your next Church / youth group Karaoke night!
Uncle Patrick
