Sing along to your favorite songs: How to use Apple Music Sing

Apple Music Sing is a new karaoke mode that lets subscribers sing along to their favorite music with real-time lyrics and adjustable vocals. Sing is part of the Apple Music streaming service and it debuted alongside 50 dedicated playlists. Here is what you need.

A fun part of the updated Music app is that you can sing duets and backup vocals, with separately animated lyrics.

“The Apple Music Lyrics experience continues to be one of the most popular features of our service,” Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music and Beats, said in a statement. “We already know that our users around the world love to follow their favorite songs, so we wanted to scale this offering even further to enable even more engagement around music through singing. It’s really a lot of fun, our customers will like it.”

The feature is available to Apple Music subscribers on iPhone and iPad at present. It must arrive on Apple TV 4K streaming box later in December, but it’s not yet known whether third-party devices will be supported.

@cnetselects Here’s how to use Apple Music Sing – a new karaoke feature for Apple Music rolling out with iOS 16.2 🎶🎤 Will you try it? #applemusic, #applemusicupdate, #applemusicsing, #applekaraoke, #karaokeoniphone, #ios16updates, #ios162, #ios16tipsandtricks, #appletips♬ original sound – darcy stokes

Start your karaoke

First, the feature is only available to users running iOS 16.2 on iPad or iPhone, and also have the latest version of the Apple Music app.

To access the karaoke feature, you must first open a song you want to hear, whether it’s from the dedicated Sing playlists or any song in your catalog. For the record, every song we’ve tried so far works, as long as it has real-time lyrics. Even those in Dolby Atmos.

Once your song has loaded, click on the speech bubble in the lower right corner of the playback screen to view the lyrics in real time.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see a volume slider with a microphone on it – sliding it up and down lets you adjust the voice level.

And that’s all. There is no official support for microphones or even to record your efforts. Still. However, we will update it once the Apple TV version is released. Will Apple TV support Siri Remote? Or a Bluetooth headset? Who knows. Apple did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.

What kind of witchcraft is this?

How it works? Basically, lead vocals are usually mixed in the middle, so they’re easy to remove with most modern audio software. But there’s definitely more to it, as songs with vocals in the left, middle, and right positions like Doinosaur Jrs Feel the Pain also worked in our tests.

Apple Music Sing is another great feature for the service, which has over 90 million tracks, plus Dolby Atmos and lossless music. Competitor Spotify has 80 million songs but no lossless music yet.

In case you were wondering, the song in Apple’s promotional image is Coastline, by indie musician Mehro.