Go Wild and Be a Sparkling Star Tonight

SingSong is an affordable extravagance. You don't have to wear diamonds, to act as a skinny model on the catwalk or to perform together with your band in front of millions of people to feel like a STAR.

All you need to do is to have a bit of confidence in yourself and a strong desire to leave everything behind so that you can feel like a feather in the wind. And anyone can do it. Anyone can feel like a rock star or a glittering diva for a night. It's really that simple: take a good piece of software, identify what type of voice you have, make the right choices and put your strong will at work. The end of the story depends on you!

The Looks

The application opens with a three-tab vertical menu that invites you to start singing, to adjust the default settings or to leave the game.

In case you are sure you want to proceed with the singing, choose the “Sing” button. The next screen suggests you two ways of starting your singing experience: 1) to provide a music file that includes the song you want to play or 2) to try one of the ten free songs available in the demo version.

As soon as you have decided which method you want to use and you specified the location of the track, you can type in the players’ names. In the same screen, you are offered the possibility to choose the difficulty level and the microphone type that you plan to use.

And, since all the basic prerequisites have been fulfilled, you can go now to the Karaoke's main window. Here, you will see the player's name on the top of the page and the picture of the original singer or album on the background. But the part that will catch everyone's attention on the screen will be the scrolling table that displays the pitch and the duration of every sound in the form of a curly, ever changing line.

Furthermore, the lyrics will be displayed on the bottom of this main six-row table by following the same pattern: the words are highlighted, as the melodic line goes on, so that you can keep as close as possible to the rhythm. If you feel that you need to get a break or adjust the song to your voice, you can open the right click menu. Here, you can choose one of the available options: “Resume,” “Restart,” “End Song,” “Adjust Lyrics” or “Exit.”

In case you want to adjust the lyrics, a new popup window will be opened so that you can use the back or the forward buttons to synchronize the lyrics with the music.

The final score results will be displayed in a separate window and will reveal as a percentage how close were you to the original song.

The Settings window allows you to choose the microphone type, to rename it and to increase the threshold if the music interferes with your singing. As the popup window (especially created for this purpose) indicates, the optimum threshold should be around 8%, because a higher one makes the SingSong performances less sensitive.

The display tab, placed right next to the Microphone tab, lets you adjust the resolution of the screen and make further configurations if you pay attention to such details. Besides the resolution, you can also adjust the font and the size of the lyrics, as well as the bar height.

The Works

At a glance, SingSong is a heartwarming piece of software. Not only is it cute and glossy but it also helps you reach both sizzling and natural sounds.

Shaggy and feathery at the same time? Yes. It is possible to reach such effects and to impress the audience even if you don't have a soprano voice. The catch lays in the accuracy of your singing and in the skill of choosing the right song for you.

But this is where SingSong helps you most: it tutors you from the very beginning on how you can pick a song, it shows you how you should modulate your voice so that you follow the natural course of the sounds and, finally, it offers you a scoring, representing the percentage you managed to achieve during your performance.

The percentage wants to reveal how close you were to the original. In case you are not satisfied with it and you really want to improve your performance, you can adjust the lyrics and the rhythm till you find the optimal combination for you. It's really fun and easy.

Start with the songs that are packed by default in the demo version, then enlarge your repertory with music files that you download directly from the Internet or from folders that you have previously saved on your Mac.

All you need to pay attention to is the fact that you have to download both the digital music file (MP3, OGG, etc.) and the corresponding lyrics file.

In case you get to the point where you want to be your own composer, the full version comes with the Lyrics Editor so that you can easily make lyrics files for any song you want to karaoke.

Another inspiring feature of the program is that it doesn't impose you restrictions regarding the number of players, as other similar applications do.

Moreover, with SingSong, you can simultaneously play with as many friends as you want. But if you want to get a clear sound, make sure you have at least a microphone for every two persons.

The Good

SingSong is chic and helpful. The sound is not as granulated as you would expect from such an application but the result is rather tender and smooth. It depends on a high level of the microphones you use, the number of players and, of course, on your skill to adjust the sound settings but, all in all, you can say that it delights your ears with silky sounds.

The Bad

SingSong doesn't have too many additional features. It's cool that it manages to keep it all simple but for the most enthusiastic and the ones that want to reach a greater level of self-mastery, SingSong could be catalogued as being rather poor with regard to the options it offers.

The Truth

At first sight, SingSong looks cosmopolitan and full-bodied. It makes you feel that you can become a star over night and that the songs you can choose from are as diverse as a peacock’s feathers. At a closer look though, you realize that in the demo version, you only have ten songs to choose from and the probability not to find the right one for you and to feel a bit demoralized by the scoring is rather high.

Nevertheless, imagine the fun you'll have next time you go to a karaoke night! Here are some snapshots of the application in action: