Does anyone know if you can play a regular CD on a Karaoke machine? I know you can’t get the lyrics without the CDG but can you sing along to a CD with an mp3 on it?
It depends on the model you get. After perusing this page, it looks like there are models that definitely do play MP3 CDs as well as regular CDs and CDGs.
One karaoke show I went to could not only play regular CDs, but the machine would also do some left-right channel manipulation to remove (or at least reduce) the vocals on the played song. IIRC, vocals are usually identical across the left/right channels of a stereo recording, while the music is not. Adding the channels afer inverting one cancels out most of the vocals.
That was a professional karaoke setup, so I’m not sure how common that feature is.