"Empty Orchestra" - "Kara" comes from the word Karappo (empty) and "Oke" comes from "Okesutura" (orchestra.)

Karaoke can be done in many kinds of settings. There are karaoke bars that offer it every night, and many regular bars offer it on certain nights of the week. Usually, you will pick out the song(s) you want to sing, and write it on a slip of paper for the karaoke jockey. Then, you wait for your turn to sing in front of everyone at the bar. Often, there will be a $1 or $2 fee per song.

There are also karaoke suites, where you rent a private room and sing as much as you want. Some places charge a per-person hourly fee, while others charge a flat rate for the room.

Or, you can sing karaoke in the privacy of your own home! Home karaoke machines are available for under $100, with discs generally running between $10 or $20 each. Building up a library of discs can get expensive, but there are many good 'starter' variety sets out there. You can start out with one of these, and then buy a few discs with songs from your favorite artists.

If you want to have karaoke at a party without investing in a set-up, the equipment and discs can be rented.

No! Karaoke can be fun whether you can actually sing or not. However, you will find that bars will differ in terms of the seriousness of their karaoke clientele. At some places, everyone will seem like should be on Broadway, while other will be full of drunk people singing "Love Shack" badly.

When singing in public, it is best to avoid really long songs. You don't want the crowd to get bored, and people are likely to be anxiously awaiting their turn to sing. Upbeat numbers tend to go over best, especially songs that a lot of people know and can sing along with. Also, while you don't need to know all the words, make sure you choose a song you are basically familiar with. Experimentation shout be limited to private karaoke sessions.

Yes! Especially for first timers nervous about giving karaoke a try.

Karaoke discs are specially formatted discs that contain music and lyrics. There are 2 main formats - CD+G and VCD. CD+G discs are basically audio CDs with lyric data added. You can play them on a normal cd player (but won't see the lyrics) and the images they display are limited to very crude computer graphics. VCD, on the other hand, stands for "Video CD" and supports good quality MPEG-compressed video. Movies have been released in the VCD format, but while popular in Asia, it didn't really catch on in America. In addition, there are karaoke laser discs and DVDs. With the formats that support video, the songs are usually accompanied by clips specifically created for karaoke. Often, these videos try to capture the look and feel or the original artist/video but end up looking pretty cheesy. An exception is the "Original Footage" series, which features actual performance video of mostly 50s and 60s acts.

It's much easier to do this on a PC than a Macintosh. Many PC drives can read the discs,and there are several Windows applications capable of displaying the CD+G tracks. On the Mac side, however, the specification hasn't been supported in years. The Apple CD300 drive, released in the early 90's, could play them. But current CD/DVD drives don't.