True story: karaoke machine with Raspberry Pi

Suppose you're preparing the party for 31st December and one of your friends came up with a new idea to have fun during the party (31/12/2012, 13.00 p.m. -.-) "Hey hey hey what about doing some karaoke tonight?" ... Really cool my friend, I have a bunch of karaoke files but unfortunately, at the moment, I haven't any sort of device to connect to your TV.. no, wait a moment, I have a Raspberry Pi :) This was my final result:

Let's see how to build a karaoke machine in 5 simple steps.

1. Prepare your Raspberry Pi: download the last image of Raspbian from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads, unzip the archive and flash it on a sdcard with dd

dd bs=1M if=/path/to/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdX

2. Put your sdcard in your Raspberry Pi, connect it to your TV and your LAN, then boot it. You need to use a graphical interface, so run:

startx

3. Open your terminal and install PyKaraoke, running:

sudo apt-get install pykaraoke

4. Prepare your karaoke machine: copy all your karaoke files in a new folder into Raspberry Pi, e.g. ~/karaoke, and import this folder in PyKaraoke. Open PyKaraoke and click on Add Songs, this window will pop up:

Press Add Folder, add your folder containing your files (~/karaoke for me), Scan Now then Save All.

5. Test your machine: try searching for your songs using PyKaraoke, with a double click on one of them should pop up lyrics on your TV.

Well done, now you're ready to rock :)

Thank you Raspberry Pi!