My Singing Monsters Karaoke Sound Settings and Audio Fixes

My Singing Monsters Karaoke has exactly two volume sliders in the settings menu and a third complaint that half of Steam’s launch-week reviewers hit. Music and character volume move cleanly. Menu sound effects do not have a useful slider. The audio designer appears to have shipped the menu at a fixed level and let players complain. That complaint is real, it is documented in Steam reviews, and it lives on the known issues page. This guide is the workaround, not a fake fix.

If you only wanted the answer: turn Windows volume down, leave the music slider high, accept the menu SFX, and never let a friend use your laptop mid-song. The longer answer covers what each slider actually changes, how the audio pipeline is laid out, and which settings live in Windows rather than in the game.

What the in-game sliders control

The settings menu exposes Music Volume and Character Volume. Music Volume is the backing track, the island bed, the remix folder. Character Volume is the Monster’s vocalization, the screams when you miss the ribbon, the curses when you nail the slide. These two together are everything you actually want to hear. Turn Character Volume up if you want comedy. Turn Music Volume up if you want a clean practice loop. Equal is the default; both should sit above half if your laptop has cheap speakers.

Neither slider touches the menu click, the song start chime, or the judge pop. That audio is on a separate bus and is louder than players expect. If you alt-tab into a meeting with the menu open, lower Windows volume before you take the call. The in-game sliders cannot save you here.

Why there is no microphone toggle

The game does not take microphone input. There is no mic toggle because there is no mic code path. You control the Monster’s pitch by moving the ribbon; the Monster sings the note using its own sample bank. This is by design, not by oversight. Steam copy for the base app lists single-player, achievements, and Family Sharing. Microphone features do not appear in any of the API fields.

If you wanted a real karaoke game, the review explains why Karaoke is a pitch-slider gag and not a singing game. If you want the closest vocal alternative, look at the broader pitch-game ecosystem; Karaoke imports charts from it, but it is not part of it.

Working around the loud menu SFX

Three practical fixes ship today. Pick whichever one matches your setup. All three are honest; none of them require editing a config file or installing third-party software.

Lower Windows system volume. The menu click is the loudest thing in the game for many players, and Windows volume compresses the whole output bus. Drop it 20 percent before a session and see if the SFX settles. This is the cheapest fix.

Mute the Steam overlay temporarily. Steam overlay sound effects can layer on top of menu clicks. Right-click the game in your library, choose Properties, and toggle Disable Steam Overlay during play. You lose achievement popups while muted, but the menu gets quieter.

Use a headphone inline volume. A hardware volume wheel on a wired headset bypasses both the in-game sliders and the Windows mixer. If you have one, set the in-game sliders to 80 percent, Windows to 60 percent, and the inline wheel to taste. The menu click will still be loud in absolute terms, but the headset absorbs it.

A future Steam news post may add a menu SFX slider. We will update this page if that happens. Until then, those three workarounds are the entire tool.

Audio when importing custom charts

Custom charts are local files. The audio file should sit next to the chart file in the same folder. If audio plays but the ribbon is wrong, that is a chart problem, not a sound problem. If audio is missing, the chart is loading without its ogg. If both play but the line slams into a wall, you have a note-range mismatch.

The import guide walks the folder structure. The chart checklist is the clipboard. Antivirus software sometimes quarantines ogg files because they look like random blobs to a heuristic scanner. If your imported chart suddenly has no audio, check quarantine before you re-download from a sketchier mirror.

When the speakers themselves are the problem

Laptop speakers vary wildly. Some laptop models have speakers that compress mid-range aggressively; on those machines, the menu click can sound louder than the music simply because the music has more frequencies to attenuate. If your speakers are the bottleneck, headphones are the cheapest upgrade. A $15 pair is enough for this 2 GB toy.

USB DACs and external speakers are overkill. The audio engine is small. Do not buy a sound card because a Steam reviewer said so.

Capturing audio for clips

Streamers should bind pause to a key they can hit without looking. The joke faces are stream-friendly. Accidentally leaving the ribbon while you talk is also stream-friendly in a way you may not want. A dedicated pause key is cheaper than an apology overlay.

OBS and similar capture tools can grab game audio directly via Windows audio routing, which is cleaner than recording the speakers. The setup is OS-level, not in-game. A quick OBS audio capture from the game’s source rather than from the desktop audio gives you the music and the Monster without the menu SFX, which is sometimes exactly what you want for a clean clip.

How this fits the rest of the wiki

The Tools Hub collects clipboard pages. The Guides Hub collects essays. The known issues page keeps the menu SFX complaint on the public record so future Steam news can move it to the launch notes. The review explains the broader pattern: this is a toy that ships thinner than its inspirations and lets the community complain for free.

If a future patch adds a menu SFX slider, this page gets shorter. Until then, use Windows, headphones, or the Steam overlay toggle. The slider does not exist on the launch client.