Android Karaoke - Sing-Along

Summary

 I don’t know about you, but I find that at some point during a party there’s always at least one person who finds the music to be, shall we say, suboptimal and wants to start crooning cool tracks themself. What kills it is not only that it sounds as though a cat has just been plowed down by a lawnmower, but often it’s more a question of the singer knowing only a fraction of the lyrics which makes it so painful to listen to.

A bunch of resourceful Asian guys couldn’t stand these situations any longer and came up with something: karaoke! This way, although it still sounds as though Daniel Bedingfield / Peter Andre / Aaron Carter showed up at your party in person, at least the lyrics are presented brilliantly. And let’s be honest—a good party duet often sounds much better than most talent show candidates.

Unfortunately, you don’t generally have a karaoke machine available when it’s most needed, due to these things not being particularly handy.

Luckily there’s Android now. Thanks to your Android phone your karaoke machine fits right into your pocket—at least if you’ve installed Android Karaoke.

With Android Karaoke you have both music minus the vocals and text & image, all of which fits nicely into your trouser pocket and is readily accessible whenever the party screams – erm, sings, that is – for your canto.

So much for the karaoke industry being in a crunch. Madonna is making millions with it and now you can, too…

Android Karaoke really is like a little karaoke machine: it features videos, texts and the matching music. There’s a track selection which retains the song and the interpreter. A menu window opens up with one click and you have the choice to either access the text via a website or YouTube. The advantage with YouTube is that the music and video in karaoke version are at your disposal, too.

Bottom line:

There’s not much to say! Karaoke is Karaoke! It’s all about singing and lyrics and images that go – more or less – with the song. The choice of songs isn’t phenomenal, but the classics are on board. What could be criticized is that the app only links to YouTube karaoke songs and that’s something you could just do yourself. But in all honesty: to whom among you did this idea occur until now? And how much time did you then spend looking for a worthwhile karaoke version? See what I mean? This app will save you lots of time.

The downside is that the premise for this app is internet access, which means that even the title selection isn’t accessible offline. This weakens the function somewhat. It also takes quite a long time for the app to load all the titles.

All in all it’s totally acceptable and quite a bit of fun, though.

Like I said: karaoke is karaoke! You can’t really go wrong with it. So let’s get straight to the bottom line:

It’s not all that practical to sing by looking at your phone screen. It’s quite simply a bit too small, especially if you want to sing with a big group of people. Despite this you’d no doubt still have a good time singing at a party with 4-5 other people.

The song selection could be bigger. Also, because the app basically “just” refers to YouTube it’s not possible to create a personalized song selection and direct back to YouTube, although this could be made a viable option without much ado. As previously mentioned and critiqued: operating this app is only made possible with internet access.

Android Karaoke runs without ever crashing. However, the time it takes for the app to load so that it can be used is considerable… And that’s every time you log on for the first time.

Android Karaoke can be downloaded for free from the Android Market.