Karaoke With Your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV and Apple Music Sing

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at Apple Music Sing. 

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So Apple added a new trick to its Apple Music Service. Apple Music is Apple's Subscription Music Service and if you have it and you have a new enough device then you can use this new Apple Music Sing which is basically Karaoke. Now don't worry, I'm not going to sing for you! I'll just show you the features here and you can try it out for yourself. 

So first off you have to have a really recent device. This only works with some of the latest processors on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. So you have to have a fairly recent iPhone or iPad. For Apple TV it has to be the most advanced version that just came out. Now you may be thinking well wait a minute, aren't karaoke machines pretty low end things. Like why can't an older Apple TV or an older iPad do this. Well, instead of actually having karaoke versions of the songs, versions that have the vocals stripped  from them, the way this works is it takes the actual song itself and in real time figures out what the vocals and removes them. It's not perfect. Even at the lowest setting you can still kind of hear the vocals if you listen. But it is doing it different that the traditional karaoke machine would. One cool advantage to this is you can adjust the vocal level and do it while the song is playing. For instance, in a duet you can sing one part and then up the volume to have the original second part come in. 

Now I"m going to show you how this works on the iPad. Chances are not many people have the Apple TV yet so you'll be trying this out on the iPhone and iPad anyway. So we're going to go into the Music App and here I've got an Apple Music Subscription. Actually under Listen Now and Browse they are promoting Apple Sing everywhere so you see mentions of it. You could go in and learn more about it and also access some playlists of songs that would be good to use for this. But you could also just Search for a song. It should work on most songs. So let's select this song on here and it's going to start playing and I'm going to Pause it right there. Now I'm going to bring up the song so we can see it right here and then tap on this button at the bottom right corner which brings up the lyrics. This is normally where you would see lyrics and for awhile now we've seen lyrics and actually show the lyrics as the song plays. So you can actually read them in realtime as the song is being played. 

Now you also have this microphone button here. You can tap that and now you get a slider here. You can slide up or down and when it is up the vocals sound normal. When it is down then the vocals are completely eliminated. So you can decide where you like it. You can have the vocals lowered so you can kind of still hear them but maybe single out and have your voice be the predominate one. So with that on I'll play. Of course I'm not going to have the music play here because of copyright issues but you could see how it's not just showing each line as it is being sung but you could see it's actually showing you what words are being sung at that time and even the speed at which it is sung. So you can sing along in the traditional karaoke sense using the timing of the words on the screen to make your performance a little bit better. Anytime you want the real vocals to kind of come in louder you can move this up and any time you want to get rid of the vocals completely you can move this down. It's fun to do when you have some songs that have many voices singing in the chorus. You can kind of become part of that with the vocals all the way up. Then lower it back down again for the next verse. Keep you finger on that as you sing.

Now in Apple TV you're actually going to use the Plus and Minus volume up and down buttons but you're going to have to select that same icon first. That would then control the volume on the vocals rather than the volume for the whole track. 

As I mentioned you can find it in just about any song so it's almost like the entire Apple Music Catalog is there. You can sing along with any song you would like way more than you might find on a karaoke machine. Even the best ones. I did notice, however, that some of the tracks I had that were matched didn't have Apple Music lyrics and thus couldn't do this. So it might not be a 100% or it may just be a glitch having to do with matched songs instead of ones through Apple Music. For this song, the one that I had in my playlist wouldn't work. But when I went to a different album and found the same song on Apple Music then the lyrics were there and I was able to use Apple Music Sing. 

Sometimes songs like this duet will actually have one part on the left side, left justified, and the other part right justified. But I searched through several different duets and only some of them had it this way. So maybe it's a special thing they have to set out with some songs. So there's really not much more to it than that. Chances are you don't have an Apple TV that can do this yet. But you may have an iPad and it may be very likely that you have an iPhone. Remember you can use AirPlay to an older Apple TV to show the contents of your screen on the TV and then kind of run this thing from your iPhone. Even if you don't have that a simple HDMI cable from your iPhone or Apple TV could put it up on the big screen as well. It could make for a lot of fun especially if you have family over for the holidays. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.