How-To Guide: Play Any Song You Want to at Karaoke Rooms in Korea
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How-To Guide: Play Any Song You Want to at Karaoke Rooms in Korea What is one to do when you want to sing your favourite song in a karaoke room in Korea but your go-to songs aren’t part of their pre-loaded music database? Karaoke rooms (written as 노래방 in Korean - pronounced noraebang) can be a fun way to spend time while in Korea, giving you the chance to sing your heart out either solo or with friends in a private room. Often small rooms in basement establishments, at any time of day you can sing as loud as you want in the space with bright flashing lights and thousands upon thousands of songs ready to be played. Nowadays there are so many options for karaoke rooms; not only are there larger rooms for gatherings with coworkers or friends but there are smaller rooms, solo rooms, and also coin noraebangs which charge you by song as opposed to by-the-hour. Pricing often sits around a cost of 500 won for two songs, and oftentimes this is even cheaper if you make an hourly booking. As entertaining as these karaoke rooms can be, I often find myself encountering a problem. Although noraebangs contain such a wide variety of songs, if you are anything like me and your music taste is more centered around pop punk music from the 2000s or heavier rock music you might not be able to find many songs that suit your musical tastes as a lot of the pre-loaded karaoke tracks are either worldwide pop hits, K-Pop title tracks, or softer ballad songs. Even K-Pop fans might feel like the song selection is lacking in some aspects if they want to sing along to their favourite B-Side tracks from their idols. Luckily enough, most karaoke machines have inbuilt technology to overcome this barrier! You are able to play your own music through their devices and sing along to your heart’s content (although this does require a bit of preparation!). If you have previously purchased your favourite tracks, or have any audio legally saved as an MP3, you can save desired tracks onto a regular type USB stick. Make sure the file formatting is as an MP3 file and not an alternative like M4A. After saving all your desired tracks on a USB stick, just bring it with you to the karaoke room and you are ready to go! Once you have made your way into the karaoke room, at the front of the room is usually a console with a mini screen and a bunch of controls over things like music volume, echo, and tempo. On this console will be a USB port, which is where you can stick the USB.In my experience, usually this is right under the NFC tag area, but this varies by machine. I’ve attached a picture below as an example. When making song selection, you click the button on the remote control labeled ‘USB’. The photo attached below shows whereabouts you can find this button on many controllers, but I’ve seen such big variety in the placement of where this button is. Once you click ‘USB’, it should take you through to a set of menu options. From here, you click the big button on the remote control that says 시작 (sijak - meaning ‘start’ in English). This should take you through to a menu slide that just says ‘USB’. Press the ‘okay’ button that is in the middle of the wheel of arrows, and it should take you to a drop down menu that shows the contents of the USB. From there, you use the arrow keys to find the MP3 file you want to play and press the ‘okay’ button again once you have made your selection. That should start playing the song you wanted right away. So there you have it- your favourite song playing in the karaoke room! There are a few things to take note of. One thing is that it won’t give you a singing score like you normally receive for other songs, which means even if you absolutely nail the song you don’t have the chance of scoring a 100 points, thus don’t get the benefit of winning a free song from the machine as service. Nevertheless, if you just want to sing and have fun this doesn’t really matter! The other thing to notice is that on some machines the track might automatically play on loop, so right before the song ends or within a second of it finishing you need to press the 취소 (chwiso - meaning cancel/close) button in order to stop the song from playing again. In order to return to the prior menu, keep pressing the cancel button. Then, you can either repeat the process to play a new song from the USB or just carry on using the machine as normal! I hope this guide was informative! Written by: Aimee McLean .