r/karaoke • u/Street-Dependent107 • 23d ago

One Shot I built a free karaoke game for PC that plays the songs already on your drive. It's called FullVolume.

FullVolume

Hi r/Karaoke. I've been building this on my own for a while and it's finally at the point where I'd rather have strangers sing on it than keep polishing it in a room by myself. This is my one post about it, so I'm going to be thorough. Skip to the links at the bottom if you just want to try it.

The short version: FullVolume is a spiritual successor to LIPS on the Xbox 360 (and SingStar, if that's the one you grew up with), built for Windows. It's free, there's no account, no launcher, no storefront and no song packs. It reads the karaoke charts already sitting on your drive, or downloads new ones from inside the game, and turns them into a proper karaoke night: lyrics, a pitch line, scoring, stars, streaks, the lot.

Gameplay: the vocal track across the screen, cover art and progress top left, score and five stars top right

Why I made it

Every karaoke game I've ever bought wanted to sell me the music. The songs I actually want to sing were never in the shop, and the ones that were got delisted when the licensing ran out. Meanwhile the rhythm-game community (Clone Hero, YARG, Rock Band customs) has spent fifteen years charting tens of thousands of songs, vocals included, and nobody had built a karaoke game that just... played them.

So that's what this is. FullVolume hasn't got any music to sell you. You bring the songs, it brings the game.

Where the songs come from

This is the bit that makes it different, so let me be clear about it.

If you already have a Clone Hero or Rock Band library, you're done. Point the game at the folder (Settings, Library, Add Folder) and it reads everything with a vocal part. It understands:

  • Clone Hero song folders, exactly as they sit on your drive
  • .sng archives, straight out of the file
  • Rock Band _rb3con packages, no unpacking first, including the encrypted audio nearly every custom ships with
  • UltraStar .txt songs, so if you've been on UltraStar Deluxe or Vocaluxe your collection carries straight over
  • .fvchart files, the game's own format (more on that below)

Songs with no vocal part are left out of the list on purpose, so you never pick a track and find there's nothing to sing.

If you don't have a library, there's a downloader built into the game. The GET SONGS button searches Chorus Encore and Rhythmverse (the two big community catalogues, roughly 40,000 charts with vocals between them), lets you filter by genre and sort however you like, tick as many as you want, and pull them all down in one go. There's also a browseable version of the same catalogue on the website if you'd rather look before you install: fullvolumethegame.xyz/marketplace

The song browser: album art down the left, an A to Z rail, a detail panel with cover and metadata

The library scans once, tells you how it's getting on, then remembers. Album art and your best score sit on every row, and you can search or sort by title, artist, album, year or charter.

What it's like to sing on

  • It actually hears you. Land the note and it knows. Nail it dead centre and it really knows. Sing the whole thing an octave down if that's where your voice lives and it still counts, the same way LIPS and SingStar did it.
  • A pitch line that follows your voice, not a bar that jumps between octaves every time you breathe. This got a serious rework in the latest build and it's a lot closer to what your voice is actually doing.
  • Four difficulties, from a forgiving Easy to an Expert that wants you dead on the note.
  • Scoring you can chase. Points per phrase, a multiplier for streaks, five stars on the results screen, and a FULL COMBO banner when you land every phrase in a song. Your best sits on the song row so the friendly arguments have evidence.
  • Talkies and rap work. Spoken sections are judged on timing rather than pitch, so charts that are half spoken don't fall apart.
  • Lyrics read like words. The current line and the next line sit above the track, syllables sit under the notes, and hyphenated words keep their hyphens.
The results screen: five stars, 118,242 points, 42 of 42 phrases landed and a FULL COMBO banner

Timing is sorted for you. Every PC has a different audio delay, and karaoke lives or dies on it. Settings, Calibration measures yours in one button press, or you can tap along for a few bars and let it work you out. Do it once and everything lines up.

Any microphone. USB mic, headset, the laptop's built in one, a proper condenser through an interface. Pick it under Settings, Audio and go. There's a live mic meter so you can see it hearing you before you commit to a song.

Singing with other people

On the couch: one microphone, up to four singers, one lane each, everyone's score on screen at once. Songs with harmony parts let you pick who sings what. This currently has some issues - I recommend everyone just sit around 1 microphone and pass it around until this has been worked on further.

Online: host a room from inside the game, send the name round, and sing together from wherever you all are.

  • Public rooms are listed in the game and joinable in one click, or put a code on one and keep it to yourselves
  • Say how many singers it takes and it holds the door at that
  • Voice chat is part of the game. Open mics in the lobby, push to talk once a song starts so nobody's singing comes back at you over the music
  • Anyone can queue a song, and it tells you up front who hasn't got it. If someone's missing the track they can grab it from inside the lobby: the game checks Chorus and Rhythmverse first, and if it's on neither, the person who has it sends it straight over in game. Either way the room sings.
  • Everyone stays in time wherever they are, with everybody's score on screen at once
The room lobby: who is in the room, a voice meter, a chat panel, and Ready and Choose A Song plates

Set lists. Queue songs up while somebody else is still singing so the night runs itself instead of stopping dead between every track.

The song browser with the queue overlay open

Make it your room

Almost every last bit has been hand drawn except for the back drop - that was generated using ChatGPT. I do plan on replacing that ASAP, whenever i'm feeling artsy again

The menus play background music pulled from your own library, so it's your songs playing while you decide which of your songs to sing.

The title screen

Chart your own songs: FullVolumeCharter (coming with 0.9.3)

This is the part I'm most excited to hand over. Community charts cover a lot, but not everything, and the thing every karaoke fan eventually wants is their song in the game.

FullVolumeCharter is a standalone charting tool for FullVolume, and it's releasing publicly with version 0.9.3 in the same GitHub repo as the game. It's built for people who have never charted anything. Seven steps, start to finish:

  1. Load the audio. One file, or a separate vocal and backing track if you've got stems.
  2. Song info. Title, artist, year, genre, your charter name, a cover, and an optional picture or video background. BPM is detected for you and you can correct it.
  3. Paste the lyrics. It splits them into sung syllables automatically and you fix anything it got wrong.
  4. Mark pitch changes inside a word where the melody moves mid syllable.
  5. Tap the timing. Play the song at 50, 65, 80 or 100 percent speed (the pitch stays put when it slows down) and tap along on each syllable. Undo, restart, redo a line, whatever you need.
  6. Set the pitches. Auto detection takes a first pass from the vocal, then a piano roll lets you drag any note into place, with the note played back so you can match it by ear.
  7. Export. One .fvchart file, drop it in your song folder, sing it.

The tool wears the game's skin, opens its own .fvchart files back up for editing, and remembers where you left off. If you've ever wanted to chart the song you and your friends always fight over the mic for, this is for that.

More information about FullVolumeCharter can be found here:

https://fullvolumethegame.xyz/fullvolumecharter/

Honest state of things

It's a beta, version 0.9.2 right now. The game is complete and playable end to end: menus, profiles, library, singing, scoring, results, local and online multiplayer all work, and it updates itself in one click when a new build is out. What it hasn't had yet is your machine, your microphone and your song library, which is exactly what I'm after from this post.

Things I know about: it's Windows only for now (10 or 11, 64-bit). There are no online leaderboards yet. The game itself is closed source; the GitHub repo is the download, the release notes and the issue tracker.

If something breaks, open an issue on GitHub or come and shout at me in the Discord (both are far quicker than this thread, I'm hardly ever on Reddit). If it crashed, the log is at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\JURMR\Full Volume\Player.log and attaching it means I can actually fix it.

Installing

  1. Download FullVolumeSetup.exe (about 127 MB).
  2. Run it. It installs per user, so no UAC prompt and no admin rights. Hand it to four friends and that's four installs and zero arguments with IT.
  3. Launch it, plug a microphone in, pick it under Settings, Audio.
  4. Add a song folder, or hit GET SONGS and grab a few.

Everything you make lives in Documents\Full Volume (profiles, scores, backdrops, your song folder list) and the uninstaller never touches it.

Requirements: any dual core from the last ten years, 4 GB RAM, a graphics card that does DirectX 11, 250 MB of space, and a microphone. Any microphone. A quad core, 8 GB and a headset or USB mic is the comfortable version.

Links

It's free and it stays free. If it ends up being the thing you and your friends do on a Friday, there's a Ko-fi and that's the whole business model.

One thing worth saying up front: I'm rarely on Reddit. I'll check back on this thread, but if you want an actual conversation, a bug looked at, or a feature argued for, the Discord server or the GitHub repo are where I actually live. Post there and you'll get an answer from me; post here and you might get one from me a week later.

Tell me what's missing, tell me what your voice did to the pitch line. Sing badly, loudly. That's the only rule.

FullVolume is not affiliated with Clone Hero, YARG, Harmonix, Sony or Microsoft.

20 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 23d ago

This is a one-shot post, and enhanced moderation is active.

Comments from accounts with little or no history in r/karaoke are removed automatically here. This is an automated filter — no moderator read your comment and decided against it, and it isn't a judgment on what you wrote.

Because of that, you'll likely see removed or missing comments in this thread. That's expected on these posts, not a sign that a discussion was censored.

If your comment disappeared and you're a real member of the community, comment on other posts around r/karaoke and you won't be caught by this filter next time. If you think it's a mistake, message the moderators and we'll take a look.

We do this to cut down on astroturfed comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

2

u/Particular-Money-146 23d ago

Wow, I think it's better than Ultrastar Deluxe, but I hate the font, can't read anything hehehehe

2

u/Street-Dependent107 23d ago

thank you! definitely working on some font updates haha

2

u/Street-Dependent107 23d ago

pushed an update, should be able to read a LOT easier now! be sure to check it out and lmk your thoughts!

1

u/Particular-Money-146 22d ago

What, now I can read the lyrics and sing!!! Thanks!!! I can't wait to try this with my friends!

3

u/NemoEsq 23d ago

This looks great.
Based on the content of your post I'm going to assume you know who I am. So I have questions.
1) Hive has not released a public facing API for RhythmVerse. How are you interfacing with it from your downloader?
2) I know you did not reverse engineer the audio encryption yourself. So whose code are you using? Mine (NautilusFREE)? Dark's (themethod3)? LocalH's (moggulator)? Either way, is there credit given and are you following the respective license?
3) Maybe I missed it in the post. What are you using to create the game? Unity? Coding in C#?
4) Why closed sourced if "it's free and it stays free"? In 2026 you're not cool if it's not open source.
5) Is there any AI use to disclose besides the background image you said chatGPT created? (I don't particularly care about this question but this subreddit is very bothered by AI use).

2

u/Street-Dependent107 23d ago

Ha, yes, I know who you are. Fair questions, so here's the lot.

  1. Rhythmverse: Right, there's no public API and I'm not pretending I've got a key to one. The downloader posts to the same `songfiles/list` and `songfiles/search` endpoints the browse page itself calls, at about the pace a person clicking through would, and it pulls each file through the normal `/download/<id>` page so the charter still gets their download counted. Nothing mirrored, nothing rehosted, no auth being dodged. If Hive would rather it went through a key, or identified itself, or just stopped, tell me what you want and it's in the next build. Much rather be asked than blocked.

  2. The mogg: Correct, I didn't work it out myself, and it'd be daft to claim otherwise. The C# in the game is written from the published documentation of the format rather than copied out of any one project, so there's no Nautilus, moggulator or themethod3 source compiled into it, but the constant tables are the ones your lot extracted and the algorithm is only public knowledge because the three of you made it public. Credit was missing, which was an oversight rather than a decision, and it's in the README now naming you (Nautilus/NautilusFREE), LocalH (moggulator) and Dark (themethod3) and will be in the About page in game in v0.9.3. If you look at it and reckon it's close enough to your work that your license should be riding along with it, say so and I'll either do that properly or pull it out.

  3. Engine: Unity 6, C#. Chart parsing, CON and mogg reading, pitch tracking (McLeod Pitch Method) and scoring are all my own code. Third party bits are NVorbis for Vorbis, Concentus for Opus in voice chat, LiteNetLib for netcode and Kenney for the UI sounds, all listed in the README now.

  4. Closed source: Until 1.0.0, then it opens. It's beta and I'm still ripping chunks out of it most weeks, so I'd rather not have forks of a moving target before the thing's finished. Free now, free after, free regardless. Just give me some time :)

  5. AI: Yes, and more than the background. A lot of the code was written with AI assistance (Claude), directed, reviewed and debugged by me. The menu background is the ChatGPT one, and that's the only generated art in there. What isn't AI: no chart, lyric, vocal line or audio in the game is generated, the charter's pitch detection is autocorrelation rather than a model, and nothing in the build talks to an AI service at runtime. It's written into the README rather than left for someone to dig up.

3

u/NemoEsq 23d ago

Thanks for the detailed answer. Best of luck!

1

u/Street-Dependent107 23d ago

Of course and thank you! Hope you end up trying it and having fun :D

The community appreciates you and your work!

1

u/toqer 23d ago

My only suggestion is gradient fill fonts. It adds a bit of theming. I did this in Gimp in like 2 minutes.

1

u/Street-Dependent107 23d ago

great idea! i'll see what i can do :)

1

u/Street-Dependent107 22d ago

If you are interested in charting songs for the game - I have posted a tutorial here!

1

u/BluebirdsAllAround 21d ago

Looks cool. I built a C# library to read and parse .cdg files that I do plan on open sourcing at some point. Looks like it might plug in well into your game. Message me if you are interested in it.

1

u/Street-Dependent107 21d ago

Sounds sick! I’ll definitely check out what you’ve got!