Andrew Beveridge

What I’ve Been Building: Nomad Karaoke

The Nomad Karaoke logo in neon pink on a dark background, with the tagline “Wherever you are, sing!”

It’s been a while since my last post about KaraokeHunt, so here’s an update. That little side project grew up, got a new name, and is now most of what I spend my time on: Nomad Karaoke.

The short version: I’m a computer nerd who loves karaoke. A few years ago I got frustrated that I couldn’t find karaoke versions of songs I wanted to sing. The options out there were either poor quality, missing the song entirely, or ridiculously expensive. So I started building tools to fix that, first for myself, and then for anyone else with the same problem.

What it does

There are two main tools, and they’re designed to work together:

  • Decide helps you answer the eternal question: “what should I sing?” It searches a catalogue of over 275,000 karaoke songs, and if you connect your listening history (from Last.fm, Apple Music and others) it suggests songs by artists you actually love.
  • Generator makes a professional karaoke video for pretty much any song, in under 30 minutes. AI separates the vocals from the music and lines the lyrics up word by word, then a person spends a few minutes checking the lyrics are right. That last bit matters to me: no lazy AI transcriptions. You get a 4K video, plus CDG files and the separate stems if you want them.

If you’d rather not do anything yourself, you can just send me a song and I’ll make the video for you. Karaoke businesses can also use it through an API, or with their own branded version of the site.

Some of my favourite recent additions came straight from people asking for things. Someone said a Hebrew song “doesn’t format correctly”, and that turned into full support for right-to-left languages. A request for a country medley with guitar chords ended with chord detection being built into the Generator. And there’s now an option to show a translation under each line of lyrics, in 33 languages, for anyone learning a language by singing.

Karaoke nights

I also host a weekly karaoke night, using a system I built myself that runs on a tiny computer. Singers scan a QR code to join the queue from their phone. If the song they want doesn’t have a karaoke version yet, they can ask for one to be made on the spot, and a quick draft is ready to sing within minutes.

The nights are also the best testing I could ask for. When something goes wrong for a real singer (a search that turns up 60 versions of “I Want It That Way”, or a song title spelled without vowels), it usually gets fixed within days, and occasionally before the night is over.

How I build it

Nomad Karaoke is a one-person company, but it doesn’t always feel like it. Most of the code these days is written alongside AI coding agents (Claude Code and OpenAI Codex), and I’ve put a fair bit of effort into making that work well:

  • One backlog is the single source of truth, and every working session starts from it and ends by writing a short handoff note for the next one. There are nearly 200 of those notes from the last two months alone.
  • Bigger features get broken into tasks, with one agent building each piece and another reviewing it before I look at the whole thing.
  • Some work happens overnight. The translated lyrics feature was built after I went to bed.
  • I keep the decisions that matter: what we build next, anything a customer will read, and anything that costs money.
  • I follow a “frog rule”: each week, one task that brings in revenue comes before any of the fun stuff.

A favourite example: Decide was painfully slow for people with huge listening histories. My own account knows nearly 50,000 songs, and my recommendations took anywhere from 46 seconds to over two minutes to load. After one focused session, they take about two seconds.

What’s next

The big one is a mobile app that brings it all together: find a song, make a video, and join a karaoke night, all from your phone. It’s in testing now, and I’ll share more when it’s ready.

If you’ve ever wanted to sing a song that doesn’t have a karaoke version, give Nomad Karaoke a try. And if you’re ever at one of my karaoke nights, come and sing with us!