There are several editors that allow the addition of lyrics to MIDI
files to create karaoke files that will play on VanBasco's and other
players that display lyrics.  Cakewalk, for example will allow this but
it is not easy.  I spent quite a lot of time trying to get it to work
and never succeeded.  Supposedly you can hyphenate lyrics and simply
import them and then do minor edits to correct alignment of lyrics to
music.  I could never figure this out.

A few years ago I wrote a program that allows you to simply play a MIDI
file and automatically insert lyrics and produce a karaoke file.  I put
a lot of effort into developing this but there seemed to be no interest.

The program takes as input a MIDI file and a text file which can be
in a variety of formats.  It automatically "hyphenates" according to
standard rules of hyphenating, which can produce decent results if the
lyrics are not too unusual.  You also have the ability to hyphenate
yourself and or make corrections to intermediate text files which can
be saved and edited.

There are a couple of advantages of this program.  You can find the
lyrics to many songs on the Internet so you don't have to type all
the info into a program like Cakewalk.  You don't have to know musical
notation to get the lyrics in the right place -- you just play the file
with the program's MIDI file player and click the space bar at the time
you want the displayed lyric inserted into the file.

The program produces various formats that are compatible with other
karaoke programs so you can produce things like "Karaoke plus G" files
for things like standard Karaoke machines.  The program inputs and
outputs files with different choices of text event types so you can
edit results in Cakewalk and other programs that have different
requirements.

I think I wrote a companion program that allows event type conversion
to help with this cross program editing.  It has been a while since
I last used this program so I forget all the details but can refresh
my memory of it and help anyone who might want to use it.

I wrote the program to help encourage others to add lyrics to these
files.  If anyone is interested, contact me and I'll send the link to
the program and documentation.  I spent well over a month developing
this program and had a few people test it with good results.  I would
love to see some use come out of the effort.

By the way, it also hyphenates Spanish lyrics and a few other languages
that have rules similar to either English or Spanish.  Be warned that
hyphenation is different from "syllableization" but there are no musical
lyric "syllableization" modules and I can not figure out how to write
one myself.

Hyphenation is a very good start that requires only a little editing
of the resulting file to make it right and useable by the program.
As stated previously there are opportunities to edit the intermediate
results.  Generally it takes two to three passes to get it really
"spot on".

Best regards,
Spencer Chase
Garberville, Calif.
http://www.spencerserolls.com/