What Is SongHub? The Free Offline Karaoke App Explained

SongHub is a free karaoke player for Android that works completely offline. You load it with karaoke song files — MIDI (.mid) and KAR (.kar) formats — and it plays them back with synced on-screen lyrics, just like a videoke machine. The music itself is synthesized live from SoundFont (.sf2) instrument banks you choose yourself.

The idea in one paragraph

Think of SongHub as the software half of a karaoke machine. Traditional videoke machines bundle the player, the songs, and the sound chip into one expensive box. SongHub says: you already own the player (your phone), so just add songs and instrument sounds. Create a folder named SongHub on your device, put your song files and a soundfont inside, and the app builds a numbered songbook — type a number, the song plays, lyrics light up in time. Our songs and soundfonts setup guide covers the details.

Why MIDI and KAR files?

MIDI files don't contain recorded audio — they contain instructions ("play this note on a piano, this loud, for this long"). That makes them tiny: a whole song is often just a few kilobytes. KAR files are MIDI files with lyric timing baked in, so the words highlight as the song plays. Because the files are so small, people keep tens of thousands of songs on a single phone — the big community libraries floating around reach 47,000+ tracks.

The tradeoff is that MIDI needs good instrument sounds to not sound cheap. That's the soundfont's job: a .sf2 file holds sampled real instruments, and a good one makes a 4 KB file sound like a live band. It's the single biggest quality lever in the whole setup.

What it runs on

SongHub is built for Android phones and tablets, and it also runs on Android TV / Google TV boxes — which is how most Filipino families actually use it, lyrics up on the big screen. There's also a PC version for those who want it on a laptop. It is not on the Google Play Store; the only official distribution is the developer's GitHub releases page, as explained on our download page.

How it compares to other karaoke apps

Most karaoke apps (Smule, WeSing, StarMaker) are built around streaming and social features — they need the internet, push subscriptions, and lock song catalogs behind paywalls. SongHub is the opposite: no account, no subscription, no internet required after setup, and your song list is whatever files you put in the folder. The tradeoff is that you supply the songs instead of browsing a built-in catalog. For people who want a private, offline videoke that just works at a party, that's exactly the point. We break this down further in SongHub vs other karaoke apps.

Who makes it, and is it safe?

SongHub is a personal project by developer jpdcs, released free for personal use. The app itself contains no songs and no ads — it's just a player. Because it's distributed outside the Play Store, the safety rule is simple: install only the APK from the official GitHub releases page and let your phone's built-in security scan check it. Never install "SongHub" from re-upload sites, URL shorteners, or chat forwards. And never pay anyone for it — the developer has explicitly warned against people selling the APK or charging for installation.

The bottom line

SongHub is popular because the deal is unusually good: a full offline karaoke system for free, running on hardware you already own, with a bigger potential song list than any machine you'd buy. If that sounds like your kind of thing, start with installing it on Android — you'll be singing the same day.