Apple Music Sing adds “Karaoke Mode” to streaming songs

When it comes to advanced features and seamless compatibility with iOS devices, Apple Music has Spotify well and truly beaten. The Swedish streaming giant has essentially the same content library as Apple and better music discovery algorithms, but Apple Music has the technical edge with support for lossless audio, spatial sound that works in Apple’s super popular earbuds and over-ear headphonesand one of the best features on the market for displaying lyrics.

And now Apple is revealing yet another asset up its technological sleeve. Sing Apple Musicavailable later this month, gives subscribers the ability to turn millions of the platform’s most popular songs into lyric-free sing-alongs, all powered by machine intelligence and proprietary processing technology.

iKaraoke

A fader appears on supported songs in Apple Music that allows the user to lower the vocals and sing along with the melody. Apple’s creates the unvoiced versions of popular songs using machine intelligence.

Photo: apple

Soon you will be able to pretend to be one of your favorite artists. It’s a neat trick that will work on newer ones iPhones and iPadsand on the most recent version of the 4K Apple TVif you want a group to sing along in the living room.

Apple is adding a fader to the playback interface that adjusts the volume of vocals in any song supported by the new feature. The timing of the lyrics display has also been improved.

People who already enjoy using Apple Music’s lyrics experience to sing along to songs for personal enjoyment or videos on social media will already be quite familiar with the look of the updated lyrics feature. It now highlights the lyrics at the exact moment they appear in the songs, and it has the ability to show where backing vocal lines are, rather than quickly juxtaposing two sets of back-and-forth lyrics. There’s even a way to place the lyrics of multiple vocalists on each side of the screen, making it even easier to perform songs with multiple singers together. (Android users will see the new lyrics interface, but won’t see the voice level slider.)

The feature only works on a subset of the Apple Music catalog right away; the service focuses on the most popular songs first, then trickles down this technology to less sung music over time. At launch, Apple Music will showcase 50 special playlists of popular songs for you to sing along with, focusing on the samples that best show off its processing prowess.

Growing melodies

One thing I’d like to see in the future is an update to the Apple-made audio production software Logic that lets musicians and labels add their own lyrics, timing, and create spatial audio tracks. This would allow the artists to bring their own enhanced experience to listeners with Apple-made headphones like the AirPods Max that support spatial audio. Such a solution could lead to faster adoption of the technology for songs that have no chance of making it onto the 50 playlists, which rely heavily on well-known songs. It would be a kind of DIY addition that Apple could plug into its service to help smaller artists and labels take advantage of these features.

But for the millions and millions of us who watch Carpool Karaoke, or who like to embarrass (or show!) ourselves while singing in public with our friends, there really isn’t a better way to do it than Apple. Sing music. And now that Apple Music Sing makes built-in karaoke a key feature everybody with an iOS device, Spotify should really be shaking in its reindeer boots.