Making Karaoke from MP3 file

Rick - September 28, 2026

Hi Rob,

Thanks for getting in touch. You're right: removing vocals and adding timed lyrics only happens on the Karaoke tab in Media Manager. The Music tab is for your normal music library, so you won't find those options there.

To make a karaoke song from a music track:

• Put the songs you want to turn into karaoke in their own folder. It can be a copy of the song file.
• In Digital Center, open Administration, go to Karaoke and add that folder under "Folders with karaoke tracks".
• Open Media Manager and click the Karaoke tab. Your songs will appear in the list.
• Select a song. On the right you'll see "Getting the song ready" with four steps. The next step is always highlighted:
• Lyrics: click "Find lyrics", pick the right result, then click "Save".
• Backing track: click "Remove vocals". This runs in the background and can take a few minutes per song.
• Word timing: click "Make word timing" once the lyrics and backing track are done.
• Fine-tune: open the timing editor if you want to adjust any words.

You can also select several songs at once and use "Fetch lyrics for all" and "Remove vocals · all missing" to do a whole batch.

When the steps are done, the song is ready to sing in the Karaoke center in Digital Center.

We also have this guide: https://www.zenpoint.org/guides/how-to-make-karaoke-from-your-own-music

If anything is still unclear, just let us know.

rob - September 28, 2026

Ahh OK I see now.

Cheers for the quick reply Rick

I will give it a go

Regards

Rob

rob - September 29, 2026

Hi Rick

I've tried but can't get it to "Make word timing"

It fails on every track i try so i have the vocals removed and the words appear on the screen with the music but i have no bouncy ball lol

Any suggestions??

Rob

Rick - September 29, 2026

Hi Rob,

Thanks for trying it out, and sorry it's not working yet. Removing the vocals clearly works on your machine, so it's only the word timing step that fails. To find out why, we need to see the message it gives.

Could you please do this:

• In Media Manager, select one of the songs and click Make word timing again.
• Wait until it fails, then look at the JOBS list at the bottom of the window. The failed "Word timing" job has a short message in red next to it.
• Take a screenshot of that list (or copy the red text) and send it to us.

With that message we can tell you exactly what to do.

In the meantime, two quick things to check:

• Make sure the computer is connected to the internet when you make word timing. The first time you time songs in a language, it needs to download what it uses for that language.
• Next to the Make word timing button there is a Lyrics language setting. Make sure it matches the language the songs are sung in.

We'll get you your bouncy ball soon!

rob - September 29, 2026

Rick

I have attached the image of the failed error message

Rob

Rick - October 1, 2026

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the screenshot, that told us exactly what's wrong, and it isn't anything you did. Your vocals were removed fine and the file is there. The problem is that the word timing step can't find one of the audio components that was installed together with the karaoke tools. That's a bug on our side, and we're fixing it in the next update.

If you don't want to wait, there's a workaround:

1. Close Media Manager.

2. Open File Explorer and paste this into the address bar: %LOCALAPPDATA%\ZenPointManager\tools\ffmpeg

3. Open the folder inside it (named something like ffmpeg-7.1-essentials_build), then open the bin folder. Click the address bar and copy the full path.

4. Press the Windows key, type environment variables and choose Edit environment variables for your account.

5. Select Path, click Edit, then New, paste the path and click OK twice.

6. Start Media Manager again and click Make word timing.

Otherwise, the next update fixes it automatically, with no steps needed.

Sorry for the trouble. Your bouncy ball is almost there!

rob - October 1, 2026

Hi Rick

Thank you so much for the workround. Me being impatient decided not to wait for the next update and here are the results....... A fully working bouncy ball lol.

Cheers for the fantastic support on this Rick

Rob

0:15 · 30.1 MB

Frank Machin - October 12, 2026

Very clever that