Gather Materials

Install Karaoke Mugen (optional)

Installing Karaoke Mugen will allow you to check how your karaoke looks like directly in the app. However, a simple media player should suffice if you don’t have enough space to install it. Check out the user guide for more information.

Get a subtitle editor

There are several of those on the internet, but the most versatile is Aegisub.

Aegisub

Official Site

It’s rather simple and full of features. It runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux (as of 2025, you have to compile it yourself, but we can help you with that).

Find a good video (or audio) source

There are several ways for you to find a good, quality video. The main source nowadays is youtube but we will also list some other sources that are especially useful when looking for anime songs.

yt-dlp

This is a very powerful tool to download youtube videos in high quality. Unfortunately, it is only available via console and the alternatives with nice GUIs usually cannot download the same resolutions as yt-dlp (for free). If you, however, find or have a GUI to download 1080p videos from youtube, you can also use that. For installing yt-dlp, please refer to the official website.

In the official documentations, you can see the numerous video format options yt-dlp offers. We mainly need -f and -F. Downloading a video after you installed yt-dlp works like this:

Find your youtube URL for the video you want. Refered to as “URL” in the following as placeholder.
Open a console in the folder you want your video to be downloaded to.
Type yt-dlp -F URL to see the available audio and video streams.
Select 1 audio and 1 video stream that suit your needs, vp9 and opus are the highest quality options for video and audio codecs, respectively. Check which codecs are supported by the song repository you plan to send your song to in order to avoid having to reencode it.
Download the video by typing into the console e. g. yt-dlp -f 137+140 URL. In this example, 137 and 140 are the selected video and audio streams, respectively.
yt-dlp will now download your files and merges audio and video streams automatically. The resulting file format depends on the streams you selected. For example: opus + vp9 results in webm; mp4a + avc1 results in mp4.
If you get an error that a stream is forbidden, update yt-dlp with yt-dlp -U. You also get an error if you made a typo in the stream number, so also double-check those.

Other sources than youtube

For anime songs, you can often find songs unavailbe via youtube at either

On these sites, you can directly download the videos via context menu.

Make the rip yourself

It is not the first choice anymore but if you either want to do it or have the BD/DVD anyways, check out this section.

More details on making a rip yourself

Again, this is primarily about Asian songs.

Some DVDs or Blu-Rays contain creditless openings and endings, especially the Japanese ones. You can purchase them for example at CD Japan, or second hand at Mandarake or even at Amazon Japan.

Once you have your disc, you’ll need a DVD or Blu-Ray drive for your PC.

To be able to play discs and copy the bits you want, you’ll need either DVD Fab Passkey (official website) or MakeMKV (official website).

With DVD Fab

DVD Fab is a software running in the background which decrypts your video discs in real-time. After inserting a protected DVD or Blu-Ray in your drive, it’ll need about ten seconds to decrypt it.

You can then either play the disc directly in VLC (or any other video player), or extract the m2ts streams you want with a simple copy and paste. m2ts streams are in the /BDMV/STREAM/ folder on your disc. You can identify files depending on their size. You can ensure their identiy by playing them with a video player, e. g. Vlc.

With MakeMKV

Extracting your Blu-Ray or DVD can be done here with the single press of a button.

By default, the minimal video length is 120 seconds, which can be modified in the settings. Since an anime opening is shorter than that, you have to modify that before extracting your OPs/EDs or else MakeMKV will simply ignore them.

The extracted video is an .mkv file. Make sure not to extract whole episodes when you select which videos to extract. Check out their duration to gauge if it is an opening/ending or not.

Encoding

Re-encoding is often necessary for rips, since extracted files are quite big by default. In order to keep a karaoke base at an acceptable size, you need to encode your video to make it smaller while maintaining a good video quality.

This is usually not required if your video comes from youtube as it is usually good enough. So no reencoding needed.

If you have a rip: Once the correct video stream has been extracted, you need to reencode it to compress it, and get a mp4 or mkv file instead of a m2ts or vob file. There are several ways to do so:

Handbrake (see below for a preset to use)
MeGUI
FFMpeg if you’re not afraid of the command line

A handbrake preset (Options > Import From File) is available here.

ShotCut is also an excellent software to cut a video by the video frame. It also includes ffmpeg. Once you finish cutting your video and saved it as mp4, ShotCut should drastically reduce your video file size without any quality drop automatically.

In order to cut a video, drop it in the middle of the program window, place the cursor where you want it (you can also use the left and right arrows for that), and then right click and select “cut at the playing cursor” then right click on the part you don’t want to keep and then “delete”.

Cutting a video without re-encoding

For cutting videos maybe after you already encoded or downloaded a video from youtube, we recommend Lossless Cut. You can either get it from the respective GitHub page or from its subpage at heise.de.

Once you drop your video in, you will see something like this:

You mainly need the orange bar at the bottom. The gray lines in there are key frames. You can skip forward or backward to one by pressing the little keys left and right from the big blue play button at the bottom center. By pressing the pointing fingers left and right to those you can select your current position as start and end times for the cut. Of course you can also manually edit the times to cut displayed next to the finger icons.

Once you have selected your start and end times, press Export at the bottom right first on this screen and then on the following again and you will get the cut saved in the folder your originally video is in. Make sure to check the resulting file to contain the material you want.

Frame perfect?

As you avoid reencoding with Lossless Cut, you won’t get frame perfect cuts as Lossless Cut automatically enlarges your cuts to avoid reencoding. The beginning will usually need to be at a key frame. At the end you are more flexible but will also sometimes get 1 or 2 additional frames. That is usually no problem for karaoke videos.

Add a cover art to your audio file

Note

You only need this part if you cannot find a video (anything but static image) for your karaoke sub and therefore have audio only.

Add a cover image to an audio file

Once the MP3 is synchronized correctly and scripts have been applied, you have to add a cover art to its metadata that KM App will dipslay on screen when the kara plays.

About the image itself:

A full HD picture (1920x1080) is recommended. If you use a classic 4/3 cover, your lyrics will have less space on screen and will cause double lines or worse, and you’ll need to cut them several times to fit into the 4/3 aspect ratio. Besides, it’ll display black borders left and right on the screen, so if possible anyhow use a 1920x1080 image.

Offical art is recommened. You will easily find one via the image search of your browser. Usually an image related to the song is best, which is why we recommend the cover image of the CD (or other media) the song was released on. Once you found one, don’t hesitate to crop/resize the picture if needed.

If your image is not already 1920x1080, use CoverMagick to convert it into it. Select your image via Browse… and then click Go. Under result you will see the resulting image framed in a green border after a couple of seconds:

If no result is produced (green border but no image in there), something about the image is not compatible with CoverMagick. Usually, it is the color profile and simply opening and exporting your source image in an image editing software (e. g. GIMP) solves the issue.

Now onto integrating your image into the audio file. There is a lot of software available to do this. On Windows, you can use mp3tag. For Linux, we recommend Kid3.

mp3tag

Install and open it, and go to the folder where your MP3 file is. Click once on it in the user interface to select it. After that, make a right click on the square in the bottom left corner and delete the current album cover if there is already one. Right-click again, then select “Add a cover” and pick one on your computer.

Kid3

Install and open it. You can directly open your audio file in Kid3 via “open with”. Make sure you have the “Tag 2” part expanded on the right half of the program window and you will see the area for cover arts in the bottom right corner. The image can be included by drag and drop if there is none already in there. If a cover art is already in there and you need to replace it, it is the easiest to delete all information in tag 2 with “Delete” on the right side and then drag and drop your new image in. When you have your image in there, click “Save” on the top left below the menu (green arrow) and you are done.

Find the “real” lyrics

This is much more difficult than it seems, since transcripts by ear are often found on the Internet. If several sources agree on a transcript, it is most likely correct.

Here are our usual references:

Lyrical Nonsense : Probably one of the best. Lyrics in kanji + romaji and sometimes more. They’re very active about adding new lyrics and updating those after the single’s release (which gives us the precious lyrics from the booklets). In order to know if one of their transciptions is an ear-made one, scroll down and you will see the status, “official” “transliteration” or “by ear”. You will usually also get the song’s release date and some metadata.
VGMdb : A huge database containing singles / albums / OST released to this day. You’ll sometimes find booklet scans by looking on the right at the “cover” field on the song’s page.
Anime Lyrics
Anime Song Lyrics
Asia Lyrics
Color-coded lyrics : Especially useful for Korean songs
Genius : very versatile for all Western songs but also for Asian ones, also contains metadata further down as “credits”

If you can’t find anything, you’ll have to do it on your own, by finding the official booklet from the CD and transcribing the lyrics yourself. For Japanese, offical lyrics will usually be in kanji, so you need to transcribe the romaji yourself. This can take some time if you are not used to it. Also do not hesitate to reach out to people on our discord server) who are more proficient in the language you want to transcribe than you are.

I’ve got everything!

Once you have Aegisub, a video (or audio) and lyrics, it’s time for you to create a karaoke.