Ever thought about turning your Linux Box into your own personal karaoke machine ? Well OSD Lyrics has just made it possible for us Linux users to turn our Linux into a karaoke machine.

OSD Lyrics displays your music lyrics onto your screen when you play music. At the time of writing this article OSD lyrics is supported  by Amarok 2.0 and 1.4, Audacious, Banshee, Exaile (Both 0.2 and 0.3), JuK new!^, MOC 2.5, Qmmp, Quod Libet, MPD, Rhythmbox, Songbird, and XMMS2.

Installing OSD Lyrics

Open your terminal and type in the following command. Remember to hit 'enter' for each command to execute them.

        sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osd-lyrics/ppa
    

followed by..

        sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install osdlyrics
    

OSD Lyrics will be installed under 'Applications' > 'Sound and Video' > 'OSD Lyrics'.

Showing Lyrics

OSD Lyrics displays lyrics on your desktop. OSD Lyrics will be minimized in your task bar after you open it. We can access OSD menu by left clicking the OSD icon in our task bar. An interesting observation that I notice in Ubuntu 10.04 is that we can't start OSD lyrics before starting our music player.

We need to download the lyrics for the songs we play. Open the 'Search Lyrics' screen by selecting the 'Search Lyrics' option from the menu. Select different lyrics provider from the   drop down list if you cant find the lyric that you are looking for.

Click the download button to store the lyrics file into your local drive.

OSD Lyrics will automatically assign the lyric and the song we are playing in our music player. OSD Lyrics will immediately display the lyrics on the bottom screen after we download the lyrics.

Configuring OSD Lyrics

We can adjust OSD Lyrics display on our desktop. Just click 'Preferences' on OSD Lyrics menu. In this screen we can adjust the lyric's font type, size, and color.

Conclusion

OSD Lyrics is a good Ubuntu software that we can use to transform our Linux box into a karaoke machine. The last thing we need is to get a microphone and connect your Linux box to some decent speaker, and now you're ready to use your Linux box as a karaoke machine.