Arriving just in time for the holidays, Apple has unveiled Apple Music Sing, a new karaoke-friendly feature that enables you to adjust the levels of vocals in mixed tracks so that you can replace or embellish them with your own.
Rival streaming service Spotify began rolling out its own karaoke mode earlier this year, and Apple’s effort appears to be cut from similar cloth. It offers multiple lyric views that enable you to take the lead, perform a duet or sing backup, and the original song’s vocal levels can be adjusted with a simple onscreen fader.
Apple doesn’t explain what’s going on here, but we’re guessing that some kind of realtime audio separation technology - as previously seen in DJing apps from the likes of Algoriddim and Serato - is in play. The company says that you’ll be able to use the feature on “millions of songs”, and is also preparing more than 50 dedicated companion playlists of songs that are “optimised for the Apple Music Sing experience”.
The onscreen lyrics, meanwhile, are animated and will ‘dance’ to the rhythm of the vocals. Backing vocal lyrics can be animated independently to make them easier to follow, and in the duet view, lyrics are shown on opposite sides of the screen.
“Apple Music’s lyrics experience is consistently one of the most popular features on our service,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats. “We already know our users all over the world love to follow along to their favourite songs, so we wanted to evolve this offering even further to enable even more engagement around music through singing. It’s really a lot of fun, our customers are going to love it.”
Apple Music Sing is included in the standard Apple Music subscription and will be rolling out worldwide later this month. It’s available on compatible iPhone and iPad models (there’s no mention of the Mac, strangely) and also the Apple TV 4K.
