TKaraokeUSB is similar to TKaraoke Pro but instead of running on a computer, it runs directly on your TV or Android Box. TKaraokeUSB is designed with simple user interface so it is ideal for non-technical users.

Step 1: Obtain the Android Box
If you don't already have a Sony TV, you'll need to buy an Android Box. Fortunately, Android boxes are cheap and yet powerful. I recommend getting the MiBox. The MiBox can run TKaraokeUSB fine and can handle 4K songs. Buy it from Walmart for $69.

Step 2: Update the Android Box
On the MiBox, go to Settings => About => System Update => Check for Update. If there is any available update, select to update to bring your MiBox up to date

Step 3: Obtain TKaraokeUSB
In the MiBox, run the app Google Play Store and search for TKaraokeUSB. Then select to install it. TKaraokeUSB is a free app so you can just install it w/o paying anything.

Step 4: Prepare your Hard Drive
There are many ways to setup the hard drive, I recommend set it up as follows. At the root of your hard drive, create a folder called TKaraokeUSB. In this folder, create a folder called Songs and put your songs in there. Also download the attached tkaraoke.txt file and save it in the TKaraokeUSB folder. Also in the TKaraokeUSB folder, create an empty folder called Thumbnails.

At this point, your hard drive should look like this:


Your Songs folder should contain your songs collection. You can define song categories by creating Name.category files and place them in various folders in your songs collection. See this page for more details.

Your Songs folder might look like this:


At the root of your Songs folder, you can optionally define two files called order.new and order.recent. You can download these two files from this post and place them into the Songs folder. The purpose of these 2 folders is to control the order of the New and the Recent row in TKaraokeUSB. The Recent row contains all the songs you played recently. The New row contains all the songs you just added to your collection. You can edit these 2 files in Notepad and give each a different number to control their order (lower number appears on top, higher number appears at the bottom)

In the attached order.new and order.recent files, I put 10000 for order.recent and 10001 for order.new. Therefore, the Recent row will appears before the New row in TKaraokeUSB. Here is a screenshot showing the Recent row appearing on top of the New row:


Step 4A - Prepare Thumbnails folder
Preparing the thumbnail images (preview image for each song) is optional but recommended. When you use TKaraokeUSB, it will generate the preview image for each song and show this image together w/ other song info such as Song Name, Singer Name, File Size. If you provide the song preview images as part of your collection, it will help avoid having to create these preview images on-the-fly. You can use TKT to prepare the thumbnails folder in just a few clicks. In TKT, go to the Thumbnail Generator tab, select the Songs folder for the input and the Thumbnails folder for the output. It is important to only put the Thumbnails folder right next to the tkaraoke.txt file and not in other places.


Step 5 - Using TKaraokeUSB
Connect your hard drive to your Android Box via the USB port and run TKaraokeUSB. If it is your first time running, it will ask you to give Storage Permission. This is because TKaraoke needs to read your hard drive to play the songs. Select Allow to continue. If anything goes wrong (such as TKaraoke can't find any song), the info will be shown on your TV so keep an eye on the TV screen. If you made changes to your song collection, select Hard Exit in TKaraoke and start TKaraokeUSB again. Hard Exit will force TKaraoke to rescan songs on the next run.

Step 6 - Configure Voice Search in Vietnamese
TKaraokeUSB supports voice search using your device's remote. To activate voice search, while TKaraoke is running, press the microphone button on your remote once (only press, do not hold the microphone button) and wait for the microphone icon in TKaraoke to turn red. Then speak what you want to search into the remote. The default language might not be Vietnamese so if you see that it doesn't recognize Vietnamese, exit out of TKaraoke and go to Settings => Speech and change Language to Vietnamese. Then start TKaraokeUSB and try voice searching again. Note that you can voice search both when TKaraoke is at the main screen or when TKaraoke is playing a song. After you stop speaking, the search will start and all matching songs will be shown. Use the Left/Right button on the remote to select the right song and press the Enter button to select. To dismiss the search result, press the Back button.

As an example, I was trying to search for Chuyến Tàu Hoàng Hôn. As I speak, it will recognize each word. Right when the screenshot below is taken, I have spoken 3 words so it recognized "Chuyến Tàu Hoàng" and the microphone icon is still red indicating that it is still listening to pick up my 4th word (Hôn).


Step 7 - Register TKaraokeUSB
Without registering TKaraokeUSB, it will only load the first 1000 songs on your hard drive. To register, buy the key online and in TKaraoke, go to Settings => Register and select the item "EnterYourKey". Then click Next to register. After a few seconds, it should display a message "Registered, all features unlocked". Next, select Hard Exit in TKaraoke and start it again.

[To be continued...]

Edited by user Thursday, November 16, 2017 7:07:23 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

The beta version was closed. What you saw on the Google Store is a production version. You can use network drive if Android allows you. On Nvidia Shield's Android 7, you can do the mapping under Settings => Storage & Reset.

Why is this usb version free? How do i queue song? Can it connect to ur vip songs server?

Not sure if this is an issue with tkaraokeUSB or Nvidia shield, but after going into setting -> storage & reset -> I was able to successfully mapped to a network drive connected as register user. One thing I noticed is that in your demo video, all the drives inside your mounted drive would display storage capacity (for example, 2tb, 4tb, 8tb..etc) where as mine just show as "calculating" and would not display storage capacity on each drive. When launching tkaraokeUSB, a message stated that no hard drive is detected, please connect USB hard drive. Can you help me out with this? Thanks HL.

I see, yes I only share drive D:\ instead of folder D:\tkaraokeUSB. I'll try it again tonight and let you know how it go. Thanks for the prompt response.