What is Karakan?
Karakan is a free and easy to use editor for creating MIDI karaoke files. It runs under Microsoft Windows. You can enter the lyrics of a song as text in Song Text Format. From the lyrics and a given MIDI file (.mid), Karakan makes a karaoke file (.kar). You can test the karaoke file using Karakan’s internal playing facilities, or using an external karaoke player, which can be started from Karakan.
Karakan’s features include:
- Easy entering of song lyrics as text (in Song Text Format).
- Automatic hyphenation of the song text for several languages.
- Playing facilities: playing from the beginning of the karaoke file or from the current line in the song text.
- Creating karaoke files either as Soft Karaoke file (for use with a karaoke player) or as MIDI file with lyrics (for use with keyboards).
- Creating and playing part-songs (songs that contain multiple vocal parts), with up to four vocal parts.
- Support for including and displaying chords (in Yamaha’s XF format).
- Support for Unicode characters in karaoke files (for creating karaoke files in languages like Chinese or Japanese).
- Support for right-to-left karaoke.
What’s new in version 9?
- Easier creation of MIDI files with lyrics. These files can now be created without having to use the “export” option.
- New format for time codes, melody track switch codes, and vocal part codes. The new format uses square brackets, which is the same as for inserting chords.
