Welcome to the KaraokeMidi Player. This program lets you sing along with your favorite Midi and Kar files, and record the beautiful music thus created. This is how the program works:

For the past thirty years or so, literally thousands of songs have been recorded as Midi (.mid) files, using a variety of electronic midi synthesizers. Synthesizers work by synthesizing the sounds of different musical instruments, each note of which is represented by a small group of numbers. Your computer, which has a built-in synthesizer, can read these numbers and convert them back into the appropriate musical sounds for each instrument. The standard midi file can encode up to 128 different instruments. The midi file is organized into up to 16 channels, and each channel can have a number of differnt tracks, one for each instrument. No one has yet to devise a realistic way of synthesizing the human voice. That's where you come in.

Recently, folks have started adding lyrics to midi files, and calling them KAR (.kar) files, short for Karaoke. The idea is that as you play the kar file, the lyrics come along in time with the music, so that you can sing along with the music. There are now thousands of kar files available, attesting to the great popularity of Karaoke.

The Black Diamond Sound Systems KaraokeMidi Player-Recorder is an extremely versatile midi / kar file player and recorder. With it you can select the desired midi output device (ie, the synthesizer driver), change the tempo and key, change any of the instruments (you can make your own string quartet!), change the relative volume of each instrument, and easily sing the lyrics in time with the music. You can record your voice, using your computer's microphone, and save and play back the recorded file. With an external keyboard connected to your computer's soundcard, you can record your own Midi sequences. And, it's FUN!