All Out of Love for Travel Karaoke

Lassiquendi's Travel Karaoke and Sing-A-Long is a well-meaning app, but overly ambitious in including either "travel" or "karaoke" in the title. Both are a bit limited.  I can give Travel Karaoke and Sing-A-Long some credit, though:  Lassiquendi, is aware of its weaknesses and clarifies in the app's description that it is taking steps to manage shortcomings in  future versions.

Offering around 100 songs, Travel Karaoke does a fair job of including both top 40 and random fun hits like Grease's "Summer Loving" or ABBA's "Mamma Mia." New songs will be added on a weekly basis as well. However, most tracks are "sing-a-longs," the original song and artist plays, with lyrics provided line-by-line from the app. The developer notes that more strictly instrumental tunes are being added weekly to the server — a much needed improvement for a karaoke app.

The pop-up format of the lyrics follow the song fairly well. But if one is unfamiliar with the song, guidance through the piece as far as rhythm, timing and holding notes is not provided: the way DJ karaoke discs and programs highlight the lyrics as they are supposed to be sung.

When the app is first opened, Travel Karaoke prompts you to download the catalog of songs to begin. The explanation that the app provides for it can be confusing, if not misleading. The catalog of songs isn't really downloaded, the titles just become accessible for viewing. Each song chosen still has to be downloaded individually. Once has songs has been added this way it's saved for future use and marked with an asterisk.

This process also brings into question the "mobile" claims of Travel Karaoke. In a location where the Wi-Fi is password protected, I can see but not download Air Supply's "All Out of Love," but can play Avril Lavigne "Girlfriend" instead because I captured it before. How many times might I want to replay that particular track? Likely not many. Travel Karaoke would really benefit from a one-time actual, full, download of the catalog. Even if it had to be time consuming, it would be worth it to avoid these hiccups in the action and save the individual downloads for updates only.

A queue can be established to create a playlist of songs, up to nine songs in order. Only previously downloaded songs are accepted. This is another area where I'd like to see the user accommodated more. It'd be a vast improvement to have the ability to set up the queue, get those songs downloading while we play with another song, and then play through those next eight songs consecutively, smoothly.

The "Test Your Lyric" game is an alternative to the sing-a-long offered by Travel Karaoke. The track pauses and offers blank spaces in randomly selected lyrics. There is no way to input your answer on to the screen, simply sing it or say it out loud and select the play button to check your answer versus the real lyrics, and select play again to resume the song. Future versions will have options to keep and compare scores, but the current one does not, nor does it gauge response time.

In spite of all this, I still kinda like Travel Karaoke and Sing-a-Long. But keep in mind that I really like karaoke and enjoy music games. This app has so many obstacles. The hope that I have for its' potential rests on the developer's acknowledgement of missteps and plans to rectify them. Let's hope they see them through soon.