Well, Tim roped me into a Music subscription with "Apple Sing." Saturday was our second successful karaoke party in the basement tavern, and we're planning on many more. I built a small stage in the bar with various musical instruments and a couple amps but it hasn't been getting that much use. But after adding a mic stand and a mic (plus the ipad), it has gotten a lot more popular.
I hung a big screen TV on the back wall, because it's not the real karaoke experience unless the whole bar can see the lyrics too. Unfortunately the old Vizio didn't support Apple mirroring. My options were either to buy an Apple TV ($125 or so for one function? No thanks) or a HDMI to Lightning connector for $55, which not only is pretty steep, but also loses the convenience and safety of wireless connection. So I ended up tucking my M1 MBP into a corner and connecting that to the TV via HDMI, and mirroring from the ipad on a music stand to the MBP. A little cludgy, but works perfectly, and no additional hardware required.
I plug an old stage mic into one of the amps, and mirror the ipad to the TV (through the MBP), both video and audio. Of course I could tweak this system up a bit, but the TV is plenty loud and it works perfectly well for our needs.
So far, everyone has either just started scrolling though by genre, or had a specific song in mind and searched for it. Since no one is singing anything too obscure (karaoke is much more fun anyway when everyone knows the song) we've had no problems finding the songs we want. I've only seen a few so far that Apple did not have the lyrics for, and those are the more obscure songs that I searched up on my own; at the parties, we never had that issue.
There is some inconsistency to the lyric presentation though. Other than the rare no-lyric songs mentioned above, we saw these three varieties while playing:
- Full lyrics, with word by word highlights - This is the classic karaoke screen view. The words are highlighted in the appropriate spot in the song, so the singer can always be singing at the right time.
- Full lyrics, with line by line highlights - This is a little more difficult to sing perfectly, but not at all bad if you know the song. One line of lyrics highlights entirely, rather than word by word so the singer has to be on their toes.
- Full lyrics, entire song - alright this is more advanced and requires a good knowledge of the song in question. I don't know how many songs are limited to this version but I only saw two, and to be honest, they weren't exactly well-known (Flatfoot 56's "Knuckles Up" is one I remember -- I really could've used the word by word version!)
Of course, there are also songs that feature the word by word highlighting but without the function that really turns it into karaoke -- the ability to turn down the volume on the original vocals while retaining full volume for the music. There were only a few that we saw like that too. But the usefulness of this function can't be overstated; if you're a shy or less confident singer, you can adjust the original vocals anywhere from no volume to full volume, depending on how much "help" you need following the lyrics and the tune.
One other issue to note: choosing songs suggested by the app or on "autoplay" or on a list does not allow for the "vocal adjustment" function. That only works when searching for a specific song. In other words, you have to type in the name of the song you are looking for and search for it in order to get the option to turn down the original vocals.
