Karaoke from any song in your music library, powered by neural networks.

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Nightingale scans your music folder, separates lead vocals from instrumentals using the UVR Karaoke model (or Demucs), transcribes lyrics with word-level timestamps via WhisperX, and plays it all back with synchronized highlighting, pitch scoring, key/tempo controls, profiles, and dynamic backgrounds.

Ships as a single binary. No manual installation of Python, ffmpeg, or ML models required — everything is downloaded and bootstrapped automatically on first launch.

Features

🎤 Stem Separation — isolates lead vocals from instrumentals using the UVR Karaoke model (default) or Demucs, with adjustable guide vocal volume. The karaoke model preserves backing vocals in the instrumental for a more natural sound

📝 Word-Level Lyrics — automatic transcription with alignment, or fetched from LRCLIB when available

🎯 Pitch Scoring — real-time microphone input with pitch detection, star ratings, and per-song scoreboards

🎚️ Key & Tempo Shifts — adjust song key and tempo after analysis, with cached playback variants for quick retries

👤 Profiles — create and switch between player profiles; scores are tracked per profile

🎬 Video Files — drop video files (.mp4, .mkv, etc.) into your music folder; vocals are separated from the audio track and the original video plays as a synchronized background

🌌 7 Background Themes — 5 GPU shader backgrounds (Plasma, Aurora, Waves, Nebula, Starfield), Pixabay video backgrounds with 5 flavors (Nature, Underwater, Space, City, Countryside), plus automatic source video playback for video files

🧭 Sidebar + Library Filters — quick filters, metadata cleanup buckets, artist/album groups, and an Analyze All action for bulk analysis

🎙️ Mic Mirroring — optionally route your live mic into playback for low-latency practice and monitoring

🎮 Gamepad Support — full navigation and control via gamepad (D-pad, sticks, face buttons)

📺 Adaptive UI Scaling — scales to any resolution including 4K TVs

📦 Self-Contained — ffmpeg, uv, Python, PyTorch, and ML packages are downloaded automatically during setup. Video backgrounds are pre-downloaded so the first session is ready to go

Quick start

Download the latest release for your platform from the Releases page and run it. On first launch, Nightingale shows setup steps, lets you pick a data folder, then installs the Python environment and ML models automatically.

macOS

macOS quarantines files downloaded from the internet. Since Nightingale isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID, Gatekeeper will block it with a message like "app is damaged and can't be opened". To fix this, remove the quarantine attribute after moving the Nightingale.app to Applications:

xattr -cr /Applications/Nightingale.app

Supported formats

Audio: .mp3, .flac, .ogg, .wav, .m4a, .aac, .wma. Video: .mp4, .mkv, .avi, .webm, .mov, .m4v.

Controls

Navigation

Action	Keyboard	Gamepad
Move	Arrow keys	D-pad / Left stick
Confirm / Select	Enter	A (South)
Back / Cancel	Escape	B (East) / Start
Switch panel	Tab	—
Search songs	Type to filter	—

Playback

Action	Keyboard	Gamepad
Pause / Resume	Space	Start
Exit to menu	Escape	B (East)
Toggle guide vocals	G	—
Guide volume up/down	+ / -	—
Cycle background theme	T	—
Cycle video flavor	F	—
Toggle microphone	M	—
Next microphone	N	—
Toggle mic mirroring	R	—
Toggle fullscreen	F11	—
Skip Intro / Skip Outro	On-screen buttons	A (South)

How it works

Audio or video file
        │
        ▼
  ┌─────────────────┐
  │  UVR Karaoke /  │  ──▶  vocals.mp3 + instrumental.mp3
  │  Demucs         │       (extracts audio track from videos)
  └─────────────────┘
        │
        ▼
  ┌─────────────────┐
  │  LRCLIB         │  ──▶  Fetches synced lyrics if available
  └─────────────────┘
        │
        ▼
  ┌─────────────────┐
  │  WhisperX       │  ──▶  Transcription + word-level alignment
  │  (large-v3)     │
  └─────────────────┘
        │
        ▼
  ┌─────────────────┐
  │  Tauri App      │  ──▶  Plays instrumental + synced lyrics
  │  (Rust + React) │       with pitch scoring, key/tempo controls,
  └─────────────────┘       mic mirroring, and dynamic backgrounds
                            (video files use source video when available)

Analysis results are cached using blake3 file hashes. Re-analysis only happens if the source file changes, the user triggers it manually, or you choose to shift key/tempo and create playback variants.

Hardware

The Python analyzer uses PyTorch and auto-detects the best backend:

Backend	Device	Notes
CUDA	NVIDIA GPU	Fastest
MPS	Apple Silicon	macOS; WhisperX alignment falls back to CPU
CPU	Any	Slowest but always works

The UVR Karaoke model uses ONNX Runtime and enables CUDA acceleration automatically on NVIDIA GPUs, or CoreML on Apple Silicon.

A song typically takes 2–5 minutes on GPU, 10–20 minutes on CPU.

Data storage

During setup, you can choose where Nightingale stores data (default: ~/.nightingale). Most runtime data is stored in that selected data folder, while config.json and nightingale.log remain in ~/.nightingale.

Typical selected data folder layout:

<selected-data-folder>/
├── cache/               # Stems, transcripts, lyrics, shifted variants, covers, playable videos
├── songs.db             # SQLite song library and analysis metadata
├── profiles.json        # Player profiles and scores
├── videos/              # Cached Pixabay video backgrounds
├── sounds/              # Sound effects (celebration)
├── vendor/
│   ├── ffmpeg           # Downloaded ffmpeg binary
│   ├── uv               # Downloaded uv binary
│   ├── python/          # Python 3.10 installed via uv
│   ├── venv/            # Virtual environment with ML packages
│   ├── analyzer/        # Extracted analyzer Python scripts
│   └── .ready           # Marker indicating setup is complete
└── models/
    ├── torch/           # Demucs model cache
    ├── huggingface/     # WhisperX model cache
    └── audio_separator/ # UVR Karaoke model cache

~/.nightingale/config.json stores app settings, including the selected data folder path.

Video backgrounds

Pixabay video backgrounds use the Pixabay API. The API key is embedded in release builds. For development, create a .env file at the project root:

PIXABAY_API_KEY=your_key_here

Building from source

Prerequisites

Tool	Version
Rust	1.85+ (edition 2024)
Node.js	20+
pnpm	latest
Linux only	libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libssl-dev, libayatana-appindicator3-dev, librsvg2-dev, libxdo-dev, libasound2-dev

Development

git clone <repo-url> nightingale
cd nightingale
cargo desktop dev

Release build

cargo desktop build

Supported platforms

Platform	Target
Linux x86_64	x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Linux aarch64	aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
macOS ARM	aarch64-apple-darwin
macOS Intel	x86_64-apple-darwin
Windows x86_64	x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.