Apple Music is getting a new karaoke feature, but there’s a catch for Apple TV users
On Tuesday, Apple announced Apple Music Sing, a new karaoke feature coming later this month to Apple Music. Here’s their summary of the available features:
Adjustable vocals: Users now have control over a song’s vocal levels. They can sing with the original artist vocals, take the lead, or mix it up on millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog.
Real-time lyrics: Users can sing along to their favorite songs with animated lyrics that dance to the rhythm of the vocals.
Background vocals: Vocal lines sung simultaneously can animate independently from the main vocals to make it easier for users to follow.
Duet view: Multiple vocalists show on opposite sides of the screen to make duets or multi-singer tracks easy to sing along to.
This sounds like a great addition to Apple Music. Apple Music’s lyrics view is already great (at least for the majority of songs I try to use it with), and this is a natural extension. It’s a pity they didn’t have it ready to go on December 1 though. Christmastime would be a great time to gather the family around the TV to sing Christmas songs together.
Speaking of the TV, that’s where a big caveat comes in. While Apple Music Sing is available on iPhone 11 and newer iPhones, and iPad Pro 3rd generation and newer iPads, you must have the just-released latest generation Apple TV 4K to get this feature. Why is that? Well to my knowledge Apple hasn’t said, but I don’t think it’s because Apple is trying to force you to buy a new Apple TV. Based on the above list of things that Apple Music Sing can do, I’m guessing the previous two generations of Apple TV 4K just aren’t performant enough to handle all of those features, or at least not in an acceptable way. The prior generation Apple TV’s A12 Bionic isn’t too different than the 3rd generation iPad Pro’s A12X Bionic, but the iPad’s chip does have more CPU and GPU cores. Regardless, as an owner of a 1st generation Apple TV 4K, I’m bummed I won’t get to try this feature. Still, I can’t wait to try it on my iPad.