Genre: Music
Developer: Rock River Communications, Inc.
File Size: 4.6MB
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0 or later
Compatibility: iPhone or iPod touch (2nd gen)
Age Rating: 9+
Retail Price:phto Free
StarMaker is an application designed simply to bring karaoke to the iPhone, and it provides a few nice twists in doing so. It is much like the Lady Gaga application we reviewed a while back, except that it includes a wider selection of songs from which to pick. Interestingly enough, there is also the ability to record your singing as well as easily share it with your friends. In terms of bringing a form of karaoke to the iPhone and iPod Touch, it certainly does that in a way I haven’t seen before.
When you first launch the app, you are informed that if you choose to record yourself, the quality will be better if you use the iPhone headphones with a built in microphone. From there, you have the ability to choose from a few free songs that are included with your download of the application. However, if you want to purchase more songs, they are available for a slim $0.99 in the built-in store (image below). Thankfully, they download rather quickly even over 3G. That said, I found that although these songs did contain the correct instrumentals for the songs, they are not the actual vocals from the song. The lyrics are the same, but the vocals have been re-recorded. While it isn’t a huge change (the recordings are pretty good), you can certainly tell the difference. I imagine this is to avoid having to get the expensive and confusing licensing deals with the record labels to use their material.
One you have the song you want to sing, you simply tap it from your available song list and are presented with the screen below. From here, you select when to start the karaoke as well as if you want to record it or not. As the lyrics come up in the song, the scroll view on the screen scrolls to highlight the line you are on and also colors the current word orange. Furthermore, it is kind of cool in that the slider at the bottom of the screen adjusts the volume of only the vocals, so you can either sing along to just the background music or with another singer included with the track.
You can stop the recording at any time during the song to save and share. To do so, you simply tap a stop button in the lower right hand corner. From there, you are able to tap a “Finish” button in the upper right hand corner to be brought to a screen that allows you to either delete your recording, share it, or add album art to it and then share it. Adding album art consists of either taking an image or choosing one from your library to use as the main background. From there you can choose to also add clipart-type images built into the application—guitars, hats, festive stuff, and text, among other things—which is definitely a nice addition.
Once you are done with the above process, you can share it. This involves emailing a link to a known address that takes them to a website where the recording is embedded. However, you can also post it to your Facebook page for all of your friends to have the link to if you choose to sign in with Facebook Connect. In terms of sharing, this is the right route to go, and it’s a nice decision by the developers. Perhaps we will see some sort of Twitter integration in future versions of the app.
In terms of ideas, I love this application. It has all the necessary features and parts of what I would expect from a fun recording application that allows you to share with other people. That said, I do believe it needs some refinements before it will really be a killer karaoke app. For one, I found the interface to be a bit sluggish and unresponsive at times. Along with crashing once, the scroller for the song lyrics also commonly gets behind where the song actually is, especially if there are fewer words on each line. Not only is that kind of annoying at times, it also makes it very hard to sing the song if you don’t exactly know the words.
As I said, the application certainly is usable in its current state. However, some fine tuning and interface adjustments could definitely make it the little bit better it needs to be for me to recommend it as an end-all, be-all karaoke application. With that in mind, I’m sure the developers are already busily doing this to make it even better in the next iteration.
Sweet app! The sharing feature is cool!