I am not ashamed to admit that I derive a certain amount of pleasure from singing to myself, often in the shower but elsewhere in the house also.
Not necessarily every day but often enough.
One of the reasons I bought a detached house was the hope that I wouldn’t annoy the neighbours if I did burst into song.
Now that I am getting round to clearing (somewhat) the sous-sol, I thought what a great place to have a karaoke machine.
Except I’m not really sure what they do. Yes I think they basically play the music of a song and you sing along to the music. But, where do the songs come from? Does the machine user need to load the machine up with songs? Does it need to be connected to the internet? Can you adjust the key to suit your voice/range - I.e. Burl Ives vs Tiny Timmy (showing my age now).
When you’ve stopped laughing, your thoughts and opinions would be appreciated. 
We bought one for our daughter. This was five years ago. It was a machine with a screen and some fancy lights, two microphones and and adjustable reverb.
The songs had to be downloaded from various Youtube karaoke videos, so basically MP4 files that were transferred to the machine with a USB drive. Downloading MP4 from youtube is easy but time-consuming, so after a while she got a bit fed up . I don’t know how those machines have evolved, I suspect not much.
We’ve had two different machines over the years. First one you put a VHS video into the player, turned on the hand mic and sang along with the words on the TVscreen. The second was a CD version doing the same. We had a right lot of laughs and a lot of lost voices but great fun and I think the last one was only about €20 in Darty on promo for parties.
As an instant starter to see if you might like karaoke why not try using spotify?
If you search spotify for karaoke songs you’ll get playlists of songs that have scrolling lyrics you can sing along to. I use it with my ipad propped on a shelf to practice/learn new songs. For me singing along works better to start with than just trying to sing alone or from paper.
I hear you Mike, not literally obviously, but in sympathy with my own singing, interspersed with angry rhetoric at whoever is disagreeing with me on the radio. The only machine that I need though. 
Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts 
