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rzzzzruyesterday at 8:06 AM10 repliesview on HN

I've been working on a karaoke app called Nightingale. You point it at your music folder and it turns your songs into karaoke - separates vocals from instrumentals, generates word-level synced lyrics, and lets you sing with highlighted lyrics and pitch scoring. Works with video files too.

Everything runs locally on your machine, nothing gets uploaded. No accounts, no subscriptions, no telemetry.

It ships as a single binary for Linux, macOS, and Windows. On first launch it sets up its own isolated Python environment and downloads the ML models it needs - no manual installation of dependencies required.

My two biggest drivers for the creation of this were:

    The lack of karaoke coverage for niche, avant-garde, and local tracks.

    Nostalgia for the good old cheesy karaoke backgrounds with flowing rivers, city panoramas, etc.
Some highlights:

    Stem separation using the UVR Karaoke model (preserves backing vocals) or Demucs

    Automatic lyrics via WhisperX transcription, or fetched from LRCLIB when available

    Pitch scoring with player profiles and scoreboards

    Gamepad support and TV-friendly UI scaling for party setups

    GPU acceleration on NVIDIA (CUDA) and Apple Silicon (CoreML/MPS)

    Built with Rust and the Bevy engine
The whole stack is open source. No premium tier, no "open core" - just the app.

Feedback and contributions welcome.


Replies

whilenot-devyesterday at 11:12 AM

Just tried it with B.E.D - Walk Away[0], unfortunately it lost track of the lyrics after 30 secs (Model is "large-v3"). Will play around a bit more, as it would be great to have a working karaoke generator.

Some quick feedback:

  - Needs a way to skip for-/backwards during playback to validate the result
  - Sentences seem to be recognized (first letter has uppercasing), but periods aren't added
  - Needs an option to edit results from the track analysis
Thanks for keeping it FOSS!

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MFT4H3VoNE

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evanjrowleyyesterday at 1:54 PM

Amazing work! I am thrilled someone was motivated to approach this problem and develop a creative solution like this. There are very limited options for Karaoke, especially in the FOSS space. Most Karaoke apps are super limited and that's driven many Karaoke enjoyers I know to YouTube in search of the songs they want to sing. This solution would give them the power to do even more songs, even better than what's out there now!

Questions for you:

1. What CUDA capability level is necessary for Nvidia GPU accelleration to work?

3. Are there any plans to support iGPU/NPU accelleration on AMD and Intel? Asking because those chips are most common in the mini computers sold at low cost these days.

My family members who love Karaoke and will be happy to try this. Looking forward to it!

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QuantumNoodleyesterday at 11:46 PM

I studied signal processing in university and my career evolved to not use what I studied. Decades ago, giving an algorithm a sound file and isolating tracks was difficult.

How does your implementation accomplish this? Were you involved or did you use something off the shelf?

Edit: ah, using neural nets, demucs. I wonder if there is pure math approach that can compete?

djmipstoday at 7:00 AM

Can you bypass the LRCLIB lookup and always use Whisper?

solsticeyesterday at 10:41 AM

Excited to try this out. How well does WhisperX deal with lyrics in say Mandarin or Cantonese? Does it output Hanzi?

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jasonfarnonyesterday at 11:05 PM

how's this different from ultrastar singer?

https://github.com/rakuri255/UltraSinger

has anyone compared the quality of the two?

defrostyesterday at 11:09 AM

Struggled somewhat with Tjamuku Ngurra by the Tjintu Desert Band, absolutely nailed Mariah Carey's Ken Lee.

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samtpyesterday at 4:49 PM

I just want to say how much I love that you used Dean Blunt in the example video

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antiheroyesterday at 10:16 AM

This looks like awesome awesome fun! Will let you know how it runs. What a wonderful idea <3

throwaway743yesterday at 3:52 PM

Just tried No_4mat's 1992... unfortunately it didn't work :(