We're having people over and rockband usually devolves into everybody wanting to sing, so we figured we might as well go right to the source.
So question 1: can we use one of them wired rockband USB mics?
and question 2: what's the proper kodi setup?
A Kodi addon called Mikey's Karaoke seems popular.
You might the following helpful...
Regarding rockband wired usb mic..
While i can use it to do Google (voice) search, nothing gets passed through the speakers. No apps can utilize the mic, including kodi/spmc. No config or anything like that in the Settings.
Tested on my Sony Bravia.
I'd love to know, too. I might be handing down my Shield to my parents someday, and they are huge karaoke fans. I've debated on buying them a legit DJ setup so they can have some pro equipment.
If somebody was to do it properly I think there's a gap in the market for a karaoke app on AndroidTV. I'm talking about a proper one in the same veign as the karaoke boxes they use in the booths in the back of Asian restaurants. There's no need for a dedicated box anymore.
You can store thousands of .kar midi files which work better for this sorta stuff.
I've looked around and only come across that Kodi version mentioned. I couldn't actually install it but it looked pretty incomplete compared to what I was expecting, but you'd have to try it to be sure.
Probably not the best way of doing it but for my older relatives, I have an amp with two inputs, one for the wireless microphone receiver and another for the shield via some HDMI adapter with 3.5mm out. My parents wanted wireless mics and already had a spare amp so went with this method.
As for apps... no idea. They just searched on YouTube with their phones and then casted it, which surprisingly with the queue option worked quite well with large parties. The only issue of course was finding a video with lyrics.
Why Kodi?
I would use a sound mixer with 2 mic and chromecast your YouTube Karaoke videos.
You might be able to screencast from a phone or side-load an Android app that can play .kar files?
Then it's just a matter of getting mic audio into a standalone amp (bass, guitar, keyboard) or stereo. Some sort of reverb effect will improve the voice.
The way I've been doing it is really simple. My setup consist of using these components: The (ARC Capable) TV + Receiver , The Mixer + Mics, and the Shield.
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One problem with mixing is the pass-through of audio. I don't know how to route the audio from a device connected to the receiver to the mixer, since ultimately you're gonna be routing the mixer's audio to the receiver (if anyone knows of a better way, please let me know). With that, one must take advantage of ARC and disabling it when needed; what this allows is for your TV (the devices linked to it) to pass-through their audio, and codecs that can be decoded, to be transmitted directly to the receiver.
If this option is enabled, assuming your shield is connected to the TV itself, the receiver will solely receive audio from the SHIELD. When this option is turned off, the sound from your TV will exit through the analog output of RCA Stereo; this is what we want for Karaoke, and what allows you to mix the sound from the TV, and by extension SHIELD, with the sound from the microphones.
Doing this set-up allows you to enable ARC when you want to enjoy the SHIELD for high quality sound for TV Shows and Movies with DTS, Dolby, Et Al. It also keeps the door open for Karaoke, when you want to mix sound from it. This is done either through the remote or an app for the receiver; my set-up uses an Onkyo receiver and an iOS app called oRemote that quickly allows me to switch between ARC & Analog/Coax.
Finding the songs are another matter, I search each song individually with voice search on the remote so I can play them through YouTube, but if it's a party you can also take advantage of the Cast Queue system with the shield. You can alternatively save a few songs to your NAS/Server set-up and play them with PLEX/Kodi if you don't have an internet connection. I also heard there are dedicated add-one for Kodi, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on those to comment.
Now, the actual set-up goes like this: Connect Shield Directly to the ARC port on the ---> (ARC Capable TV that has Stereo/RCA Audio Out) ---> Connect Stereo to 1/4 cable to TV Audio Out with 1/4 end going into one of the inputs on the mixer ---> Connect Microphone(s) to their respective input port(s) on the Mixer ---> Connect the other Stereo to 1/4 Cable from Mixer output to receiver input ---> Change audio Mode on Mixer from ARC to Analog/Coax with Remote/App ---> Fine Tune the levels of Volume, Echo, effects, etc to desired levels ---> Cast/Remote/Voice Search (Song Name Karaoke) ---> Play ---> Karaoke!