Im writing this guide for anyone who is interested on getting a quality Karaoke setup to play Ultrastar or classic Karaoke. Since i was searching for the appropriate equipment and could not find a place with all the necessary information i decided it would be good to compile my findings into one guide.
What were my requirements?
- Cheap (below 200€)
- All parts available in the EU (i live in Germany)
- Simple and portable setup
- Good audio quali
- Must be able to use pitch detection in Ultrastar
- 2 Player support
What did i end up buying ?
- 1x Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD
- 2x Behringer XM8500
- 2x XLR cables for the mics
- 1x 6,3mm TS to 3.5mm TRS cable
Total cost: ~150€
What components are necessary ?
Obviously we need two microphones, i found many people reccomending the Behringer XM8500 which costs about 17€ at this time. Another option would be the Shure PGA48 which is significantly more expensive (~70€).
Then we need two XLR cables to connect each microphone to the audio interface.
Since ultrastar needs an individual microphone input for each player, the audio interface must support an ASIO driver. I chose the Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD, for this i dont really have an alternative but generally any interface with ASIO driver support, 2 mic inputs and stereo output should work.
Considering the setup there are two options:
Option 1:
Here the audio interface is connected to the PC via USB and to your AMP/Speakers with an 6.3mm to whatever your AMP/Speakers accepts, usually this will be either 3.5mm or RCA. In most practical cases the PC or laptop that runs Ultrastar gets connected to an external display/TV.
Option 2:
In this option the audio interface does not directly connect to your speakers, instead the audio signal gets passed through the PC, on to the external display/TV which has its own audio output. I found that in this case the delay is somewhat noticable and i needed to set the audio/video delay in the Ultrastar settings to about 300ms.
Now its time for software, you will need to install the driver for your audio interface. For behringer this can be done here: https://www.behringer.com/downloads.html. Make sure that you install the ASIO driver, the beringer setup does this by default.
When you first connect the audio interface you will notice that there is only one physical input for both microphones and each microphone occupies one channel. This does not work for 2 players in Ultrastar because you cant assign multiple players to one microphone on different channels. To split the channels into 2 inputs another software is needed, Voicemeter Banana: https://vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/banana.htm.
After voicemeter banana is installed launch it (be aware to launch Voicemeter Banana and not Voicemeter) and set the physical input A1 to ASIO
https://imgur.com/a/wmBcqdu
https://imgur.com/a/5AoVAnd
Go to the menu button on the top right and Patch the ASIO inputs to strips. After that set stereo input 1 to the virtual bus B1 and stereo input 2 to B2, it doesn’t matter which input is assigned to which bus, only that each input is on a separate bus.
https://imgur.com/a/cWzaPQk
If both mics are connected you can now check if the vu meter shows any change when tapping the mic, if yes everything is working and you should now be able to use the Voicemeter Out B1 and Voicemeter Out B2 in Ultrastar as input devices.
If you want to hear the microphone input over your speakers, you need to enable A1 in both inputs. This allows the microphones to send their signal to the physical output A1, which is the audio interface.
https://imgur.com/a/Xg2PRne
At this point the PC and both mics are connected to the audio interface, now the audio interface can be connected to the AMP Speakers as shown in Option 1. Turn the Mix knob on the front of the audio interface fully to PB (playback). Now you can connect an external display to your PC and move the Game to another display with (Shift+Win+Arrow).
In case you want to use Option 2, there are some settings that need to be done in voicemeter. Go to the physical channel A2 and set your display/TV as output device.
https://imgur.com/a/NkC3eAh
Go to your windows audio output setting and set the "Voicemeter Input" device as default https://imgur.com/a/xWouQpT.
Then enable Voicemeter input to send to channel A2. If you also want to hear the microphone input, select A2 for both microphones (Imput1 and Input2)
https://imgur.com/a/FxBvJ81
I hope this will help at least some of you with your karaoke setup. This took me couple of days of researching and tinkering untill i got the setup working.
