KaraokeArcade

Your TV is the stage. Everybody's phone is the remote. Nobody installs anything.

KaraokeArcade runs the whole night from a browser. Guests scan a QR code, search your library, queue a song and watch their place in line from the couch. You self-host it on a laptop, a Mac mini, a Raspberry Pi or a NAS — no accounts to make, no subscription, no ads, nothing phoning home.

One queue, three kinds of turn

There is one rotation and everything takes its turn in it. A trivia round and a singer battle sit in the queue exactly like a song does — they come round when they come round, and each costs a turn.

🎤 Karaoke

The part everybody came for. MP3+G, MP4 and a music-synced visualizer, a round-robin queue that stays fair as people arrive, and singers who can manage their own spot without asking the host for anything.

• Queue from the couch. Search by artist or song, star the ones you want later, tap once to get in line.
• Know when you're up. A strip at the top of every screen counts down to your turn.
• Step away. Hit pause and the rotation skips you until you're back — your songs keep their place.
• Your list is yours. Drag your own upcoming songs into the order you want. The rotation between singers stays automatic.
• Sing it in your key. Shift a song up or down six semitones without changing its tempo, and it remembers next time.
• A moment between songs. A short intermission names and shows the next singer, so nobody's left hunting for the mic.

🧠 Trivia

Music trivia that takes the gap between two singers, so the room has something to do — and the guests who would rather not sing get a way to play.

• A round waits in the queue like a singer does, and comes up about once per lap.
• Five questions, on an arcade cabinet on the TV, with four colored keys on every phone in the room.
• Anyone can play, whether or not they have a song queued. One answer each, first tap counts.
• The right answer goes up for everyone at once, then how many got it. After the last question come the high scores on a podium, then the winner, then the next singer is on.
• Questions come from the Open Trivia Database and are cached ahead of time, so a party in a basement with no internet still plays.

🥊 Singer Battle

One turn, two singers, and each of them picks the other's song. It runs on the TV as an arcade cabinet: fighters, a VS slam, two-minute rounds and a verdict.

• Pick who you sing as. Eight fighters; whoever you choose is who the room watches on stage.
• Throw a challenge. Pick somebody in the room, then pick the song they have to sing. Their phone gets 45 seconds to accept — and the song they pick back is the one you sing. Neither of you sees the other's choice until it's on screen.
• Two minutes each, so a whole battle is about five minutes of the night and costs one place in the queue, not two.
• The room decides. Everybody votes on their own phone — one vote each, anonymous, and nobody sees the count until the verdict. (Prefer it loud? A player running on the machine with the mic can score it on crowd noise instead.)

Create your own singers with CharacterAssetGenerator.

Trivia and battles are off until a host turns them on for a room, so a night that is only songs is only songs.

Good to know

• Nothing to install for guests — it's a web app; joining is a QR code and a name.
• Guests welcome. Let people in with an account, a new sign-up or as a guest, room by room.
• More than one room. Each has its own queue and can be password-protected.
• Microphones are not required. The player only outputs music, so your audio setup can be as simple or as serious as you like — see the F.A.Q.
• Your library stays yours. Point it at your folders; it scans MP3+G (including zipped) and MP4.
• No ads, no telemetry, no cloud account. Self-hosted, and ISC-licensed.

How KaraokeArcade compares

KaraokeArcade is a fork of Karaoke Eternal, and tracks it for the media, scanning and server side. Where it differs is what the night feels like for the people in the room.

	KaraokeArcade	Karaoke Eternal
Queue from your phone	✅	✅
MP3+G, MP4, visualizer	✅	✅
QR-code joining, guest accounts	✅	✅
Fair round-robin rotation	✅	✅
Reorder your own songs	✅ Drag them on your Me tab	Host only
See how long until your turn	✅ Counts down in the header	Guess from the list
Step away without losing your spot	✅ Pause and resume	Remove and re-queue
Between songs	✅ Intermission names the next singer	Songs run back-to-back
Music trivia rounds	✅ Built in, takes its own turn	❌
Head-to-head singer battles	✅ Built in, with fighters and a room vote	❌
Make your own fighters	✅ A written brief becomes sprite sheets, via an AI pipeline (CharacterAssetGenerator)	❌
What you've sung	✅ Kept per singer, across parties	❌
Change key	✅ ±6 semitones, same tempo, remembered next time you queue it	❌
Look and feel	DECK — dark, mixing-desk	The original Karaoke Eternal UI
Self-hosted, ad-free, no telemetry	✅	✅

Both are free and ISC-licensed. If you want the original's simplicity, it's an excellent piece of software and you should use it.

Getting started

KaraokeArcade has three parts. Getting Started walks through them step by step:

• Server — runs on a Windows PC, a Mac, a Raspberry Pi or a NAS, and serves both the app and your media. See installation (from source for now).
• App — the phone app everyone uses. Nothing to install.
• Player — the same app, running fullscreen on whatever is hooked up to your TV and speakers.

Support

For bugs and requests specific to this fork, open an issue.

Contributing & development

Contributions are welcome — please open an issue before starting on anything major, since the project's scope is deliberately narrow.

You'll need Node.js v24 or later and Bun v1.2 or later:

1. Fork and clone the repo
2. bun install
3. npm run dev, then look for "Web server running at" for the server URL

Other useful scripts: npm test (vitest), npm run lint, npm run typecheck, and npm run build followed by npm run serve for a production run.

Credits

KaraokeArcade is a fork of Karaoke Eternal by RadRoot LLC, used under the ISC license. Trivia questions come from the Open Trivia Database, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.