The Gregory Brothers in Smule Apps + Contest This week marked the first batch of song releases by The Gregory Brothers in Sing! Karaoke, Magic Piano, Guitar! by Smule, AND Songify! *Bed Intruder* *Can’t Hug Every Cat* *Backin’ Up* *The Acoustics of the Bathroom* "Double Rainbow" "Winning" "Oh My Dayum" "I’m Back" Additionally, two new Gregory Brothers tracks will be released every Monday, for the next few weeks, To celebrate these exciting releases, we’re announcing The Gregory Brothers contest in Sing! Karaoke! HOW TO ENTER In Sing! Karaoke, perform any Gregory Brothers song Include the hashtag #GregoryBrothers in your song description Share your performances through Facebook and Twitter The Gregory Brothers will personally judge the performances and handpick a grand prize winner and runner-up! PRIZES grand prize → In addition to receiving a new iPad Air, the grand prize winner will be “a Gregory Brother” for a week, and his/her face will be featured on GB’s YouTube Channel as well as thegregorybrothers.com runner-up prize → care packages from Smule and The Gregory Brothers, including an autographed photo of The Gregory Brothers, a Smule t-shirt, and an app subscription of his/her choice, and much more! additional prizes → 20 contest entries will be randomly-selected to receive Smule t-shirts and one-month subscriptions to any app! Official contest rules Download Sing! Karaoke for iPhone/iPad! http://bit.ly/StL_SingiOS Download Sing! Karaoke for Android! http://bit.ly/Stl_SingAndroid http://www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho http://www.youtube.com/user/thegregorybrothers http://www.thegregorybrothers.com/
Pop-upView Separately

The Gregory Brothers in Smule Apps + Contest

This week marked the first batch of song releases by The Gregory Brothers in Sing! Karaoke, Magic Piano, Guitar! by Smule, AND Songify!

  • *Bed Intruder*
  • *Can’t Hug Every Cat*
  • *Backin’ Up*
  • *The Acoustics of the Bathroom*
  • "Double Rainbow"
  • "Winning"
  • "Oh My Dayum"
  • "I’m Back"

Additionally, two new Gregory Brothers tracks will be released every Monday, for the next few weeks, To celebrate these exciting releases, we’re announcing The Gregory Brothers contest in Sing! Karaoke!

HOW TO ENTER

  1. In Sing! Karaoke, perform any Gregory Brothers song
  2. Include the hashtag #GregoryBrothers in your song description
  3. Share your performances through Facebook and Twitter
  4. The Gregory Brothers will personally judge the performances and handpick a grand prize winner and runner-up!

PRIZES

  1. grand prize → In addition to receiving a new iPad Air, the grand prize winner will be “a Gregory Brother” for a week, and his/her face will be featured on GB’s YouTube Channel as well as thegregorybrothers.com
  2. runner-up prize → care packages from Smule and The Gregory Brothers, including an autographed photo of The Gregory Brothers, a Smule t-shirt, and an app subscription of his/her choice, and much more!
  3. additional prizes → 20 contest entries will be randomly-selected to receive Smule t-shirts and one-month subscriptions to any app!

Official contest rules

Download Sing! Karaoke for iPhone/iPad!
http://bit.ly/StL_SingiOS

Download Sing! Karaoke for Android!
http://bit.ly/Stl_SingAndroid

http://www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho

http://www.youtube.com/user/thegregorybrothers

http://www.thegregorybrothers.com/

Extra-Life: A 25-Hour Gaming Marathon for Charity

This weekend, Smule engineer Alex K will be participating in Extra-Life, a 25-hour gaming marathon that raises money for children’s hospitals across the country. He’ll be playing for Children’s Hospital Oakland to help out sick kids facing scary stuff like cancer, cystic fibrosis, and injuries from accidents. Additionally, Smule will be matching donations up to $2000 to support the cause!

You can donate or spread the word here, as well as find a link to his twitch stream so you can watch him play. Donations are tax deductible and all proceeds go directly to the hospital! The event starts at 8a Pacific on Saturday, Nov 2nd, and goes until 8a the next day (including a bonus hour thanks to daylight savings!).

As for what games he’ll be playing, you can expect a LOT of League of Legends, possibly some Amnesia: The Dark Descent in the middle of the night when things get super scary, and maybe finally finishing Bioshock: Infinite. And seeing as Smuleans just can’t live without music, Alex will also be shuffling through a playlist of his top 25 most listened to artists of the last year, which is chock full of amazing (and embarrassing) tunes.

As the unofficial Extra-Life motto states: DO IT FOR THE KIDS!

#SpreadTheLove Contest - Winners We would like to thank the Smule community for participating in the #SpreadTheLove Contest! We received an unprecedented 19,000 submissions, and over 100,000 ‘loves’ were given! Truly unbelievable!  Congratulations to all 200 winners! As promised, we’ve created a web-exclusive playlist featuring the Contest submissions that received 100 ♥ or more. An outstanding feat! ♫ http://smule.com/listen/stl-winners ♫ The following is a list of winners for each ‘love’ tier (in descending order, by # of ♥): Winners will be contacted soon and should receive their prizes in the next few weeks. Thank you! Official contest rules: http://bit.ly/SpreadTheLove-ContestRules
Pop-upView Separately

#SpreadTheLove Contest - Winners

We would like to thank the Smule community for participating in the #SpreadTheLove Contest! We received an unprecedented 19,000 submissions, and over 100,000 ‘loves’ were given! Truly unbelievable! 

Congratulations to all 200 winners! As promised, we’ve created a web-exclusive playlist featuring the Contest submissions that received 100 ♥ or more. An outstanding feat!

♫ http://smule.com/listen/stl-winners ♫

The following is a list of winners for each ‘love’ tier (in descending order, by # of ♥):

Winners will be contacted soon and should receive their prizes in the next few weeks. Thank you!

Official contest rules: http://bit.ly/SpreadTheLove-ContestRules

A Behind the Scenes Look at Licensing at Smule

Here at Smule, we strive to get the hottest songs for you to sing, play, and collaborate on, while working within the multi-layered world of the music industry. On any given day, we speak with partners from all of the major publishing companies who represent the artists and songs that you love. These publishers make sure that all songwriters receive fair compensation for their hard work. For every song we add to any app’s songbook, we get clearance from every writer (frequently up to 5 per song) to put the song into our apps. As you can imagine, we’re on the phone and email a lot!

In the past few months, we’ve worked hard to add some of the world’s top hits into our apps. These awesome songs include the following:

"Applause" by Lady Gaga
"Treasure" by Bruno Mars
"Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke
"Stay" by Rihanna

We pride ourselves on keeping this process legal and fair. This includes respecting the wishes of the songwriters when they no longer desire to see their work in certain media outlets. Sometimes, songwriters have a very specific view on how and where they want their songs to appear.  That said, we’ve been advised that 19 of our songs in Sing! need to be removed from the catalog because the writers no longer wish for them to appear in any karaoke setting. Artists whose songs are affected include the following: Adele, Coldplay, Van Morrison, Mumford & Sons, Eurythmics, and Elvis Costello.

We continue to request and release new songs every day, and we appreciate your input on songs you’d like to see in our catalog! You can always request specific songs here: http://bit.ly/SuggestSongsForSmule

Thanks for understanding, and keep on rockin’ on,

Lynn
Content Licensing and Analytics Lead

1st ever Smackathon: Results!

Hello friends,

Just wanted to drop you a quick note mentioning the winners of the 1st ever Smackathon. I personally had a ton of fun coordinating and participating in this event. As you can see, the results were simply amazing!

After the event concluded, we retreated as a company to a lovely house in San Francisco for our Smule Summer party. Here, each team presented their finished product to their peers and a panel of esteemed judges.

After the presentations, the judges convened to determine the winner for each of the following categories:

Best use of sound: Super Sing!

Team “Born in the 90s” - Nick R (all by himself)

"Super Sing puts the user in complete control of a giant group singing experience."

Most Innovative: Obamatron

Team America - Parag C, Mark G, Randal L, Ian S

Inspired in part by Jimmy Fallon’s, “Brian Williams Raps Snoop Dog,” we strove to create an app which would allow Obama to sing any of the 700+ songs in the catalog of our karaoke app Sing! A second, complementary mode lets Obama sing any lyrics one types into the app.

Most Likely to make it into a Smule Product: Sing! Battle

Team Awesome - Mike A, Greg T

"Singing is fun; beating your friends at singing is funner. We built a delightfully fast, competitive way to let the people know that when it comes down to laying down a verse from Lady Marmalade, Can’t Fight This Feeling, or Gangsta’s Paradise, YOU are Number 1!"

Best use of Smule Data: Smule Pulse

Team Chereshka - Svilen I, Asen L, Georgi M

"Smule Pulse visualizes the data of performances, comments, loves and listens from the past 10 minutes in various ways to make it easy to comprehend."

image

image

Smule at SF MusicTech Summit

Smule CTO Alex Li presented a talk "Smule Nation: Building a Social Music Platform" at 2013 SF Music Tech Summit yesterday. You may find the slides here.

Alex also joined a panel discussion "Streaming Huge Amount of Music", moderated by Rusty Hodge from SomaFM. Other participants include Michael Cerda from Vevo, Chris Martin from Pandora and Brewster Kahle from Archive.org.

Smackathon Project - Obamatron

Obamatron is the Smackathon project created by Team America, the upstanding, patriotic team of engineers including Mark Godfrey, Ian Simon, Randal Leistikow, and Parag Chordia.

Inspired in part by Jimmy Fallon’s, “Brian Williams Raps Snoop Dog,” we strove to create an app which would allow Obama to sing any of the 700+ songs in the catalog of our karaoke app Sing! A second, complementary mode lets Obama sing any lyrics one types into the app.

We started by downloading the set of all of President Obama’s weekly addresses from the White House website and running speech recognition software on each video to identify the timing of all words. (The corpus contains approximately 7500 unique words.) We then developed a language model capable of mapping the lyrics to be sung with the best-matching sequence of words in the source videos, automatically finding closest-sounding substitute words whenever exact matches were never said by Obama in the available videos. By combining audio and video processing components from our apps Songify, AutoRap, and CineBeat, we were able to align the selected sequence of video clips to the rhythm of the song and shift the pitch of the voice to the song’s melody.

This technology could be modified to have any person be the singer, so long as sufficient source video recordings are available; the more quantity and variety of high-quality recordings available, the easier it will generally be to find a good match. In the 48-hour timeframe, we did not have time to perfect the language model and sequencing, so there are several steps we’ve sketched out to improve the realism and overall quality of the result. This was a really fun project, so we hope to revisit this work in the future. We also look forward enthusiastically to the next Smackathon. USA! USA! USA!

The new Smule.com + #SpreadTheLove Contest Starting today, anyone can now log in to http://www.smule.com to love, favorite, and comment on performances, and follow friends. To celebrate this new web launch, we’re announcing the #SpreadTheLove contest, where everyone can be a winner! HOW TO ENTER In Sing! Karaoke, create a new performance of any song (including open mic) Save your performance, and include the hashtag #SpreadTheLove in your song description Share your performance with the world and have them LOVE it!↳ Remember, since smule.com is now open to everyone on the web, you can share on Facebook, Twitter, or any social platform to get friends/family to love your performance! The Contest will begin at 8:00 am PDT on October 1, 2013 and will end at 11:59 pm PDT on October 15, 2013. Contestants may enter as many performances as desired; however, only one performance (the most “loved” performance) will be eligible to win prizes. PRIZES - if you reach: 100 ♥ → feature on winners playlist on smule.com 500 ♥ → 1–month subscription to any Smule app (or gift for any user) 1,000 ♥ → 1–month subscription to any Smule app (or gift for any user) + Smule t-shirt 5,000 ♥ → 1–year subscription to any Smule app (or gift for any user) + Smule t-shirt 10,000 ♥ → 16GB iPhone 5s, unlocked + 1–year subscription + Smule t-shirt Official contest rules: http://bit.ly/SpreadTheLove-ContestRules Download Sing! Karaoke for iPhone/iPad! http://bit.ly/StL_SingiOS Download Sing! Karaoke for Android! http://bit.ly/Stl_SingAndroid
Pop-upView Separately

The new Smule.com + #SpreadTheLove Contest

Starting today, anyone can now log in to http://www.smule.com to love, favorite, and comment on performances, and follow friends. To celebrate this new web launch, we’re announcing the #SpreadTheLove contest, where everyone can be a winner!

HOW TO ENTER

  1. In Sing! Karaoke, create a new performance of any song (including open mic)
  2. Save your performance, and include the hashtag #SpreadTheLove in your song description
  3. Share your performance with the world and have them LOVE it!

↳ Remember, since smule.com is now open to everyone on the web, you can share on Facebook, Twitter, or any social platform to get friends/family to love your performance!

The Contest will begin at 8:00 am PDT on October 1, 2013 and will end at 11:59 pm PDT on October 15, 2013. Contestants may enter as many performances as desired; however, only one performance (the most “loved” performance) will be eligible to win prizes.

PRIZES - if you reach:

  1. 100 ♥ → feature on winners playlist on smule.com
  2. 500 ♥ → 1–month subscription to any Smule app (or gift for any user)
  3. 1,000 ♥ → 1–month subscription to any Smule app (or gift for any user) + Smule t-shirt
  4. 5,000 ♥ → 1–year subscription to any Smule app (or gift for any user) + Smule t-shirt
  5. 10,000 ♥ → 16GB iPhone 5s, unlocked + 1–year subscription + Smule t-shirt

Official contest rules: http://bit.ly/SpreadTheLove-ContestRules

Download Sing! Karaoke for iPhone/iPad!
http://bit.ly/StL_SingiOS

Download Sing! Karaoke for Android!
http://bit.ly/Stl_SingAndroid

THE FACES OF SMULE — From Singapore to Orlando, the Sing!dom has moved beyond the digital world! Over the past 7 days, something truly amazing has taken place. More than 50 people around the world, who met each other through a FREE mobile app, stepped out of the digital world to create music and memories together in real life. Of course the Mobile app that brought them together was Sing! Karaoke by Smule, and these people are particularly amazing and outgoing to begin with, but it gives me goosebumps nonetheless! It has been my absolute pleasure to witness first hand the evolution of this budding community of Singers, Musicians, Mothers, Fathers, Friends, Families, Techies and Non Techies alike surrounding Smule’s social music making app. So many personalities from so many walks of life are represented in this community and words don’t describe how inspiring it is to see them bonding over something like creating music and a shared interest in self expression. This is what Smule set out to develop over 5 years ago and it’s surreal to think that it is actually happening! Here’s a Sing! Meetups Welcome Message from some of the LA crew: http://www.smule.com/p/112842052_17774395 LOS ANGELES MEETUP RECAP I flew to Los Angeles last Wednesday to attend the meetup in LA. After getting a rental car and briefly meeting up with David Leon of the Voice of Life project (who was kind enough to let me crash at his lovely abode in the Hollywood hills) I drove to San Bernardino to pick up Tino (aka Ponce). Little did I know that with traffic, the round trip effort would take 4 hours, but it was worth every second. What would an LA meetup be without the superstar that is Tino!? The meetup was originally supposed to take place at The Parlor Hollywood (huge shout out to Mary and Brooke for scouting out places ahead of time) where Wednesday evening Karaoke is hosted by Trevor Penick from the boy band O-Town. When we arrived though, to our dismay, we found that the venue had been booked for a special event so there wouldn’t be karaoke that evening. I have to say this took the wind out of our sales pretty quickly, but someone said Key and Peele had been sighted on the premises and that the event must have been booked by them last minute to celebrate their new TV show on Comedy Central. Ohhhhhh Los Angeles! Thankfully the crew rallied and we found an alternate karaoke place in Korea Town. Somehow after figuring out how to get their cars out of Valet parking (another LA thing) everyone arrived at the new place only to find it had hardly any songs in English! HAHA! But Brooke and Mary knew of a place just around the corner called the Brass Monkey Cafe (which they had scouted out ahead of time as well) and that turned out to be the BEST possible karaoke place for our large group of 18 people! Once we settled in, with T-Shirts and drinks distributed, a grand time was had by all. It was so cool to see these people singing in real life. I finally had faces for the voices I had only ever heard online. Speaking of faces, I met a lot of Sing!ers that I didn’t know before the meetup, some of which had never sang in an open Karaoke bar before, but you wouldn’t have known because everyone of them seemed like a pro. Mary and Brooke even sang a mashup that they had perfected on the app, which was something I think the KJ had never seen happen before! And at one point the whole place turned into a dance party when someone not in our group sang Ignition (remix) by R. Kelly. It is always so cool to see the song selections that people make and the responses that come from these selections. This is something I noticed first at last month’s NYC meetup. The bar closed at 2am and a handful of us crazy Sing!ers were there until the end. Considering most of these people had never met in real life before, it made sense! The next day people were posting pictures and videos from the event in the Smule Sing! Meetups Group on Facebook and I hope more meetups will follow OTHER MEETUPS AROUND THE WORLD In the following days, more pictures and videos poured in from the other Meetups around the world. Indonesia, Singapore, and Orlando all had representatives of the Sing!dom meeting up and rocking out on karaoke. Sporting their Smule T-shirts and having a good time :) What a magical place this app is! Here’s to the Sing!dom and connecting people all around the world through music, both online and in real life! Of course, if you are reading this and are interested in attending or planning a meetup in YOUR city or area, join the Smule Sing! meetups group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SmuleSingMeetups/ We’ll even send you T-Shirts! TK
Zoom Info
THE FACES OF SMULE — From Singapore to Orlando, the Sing!dom has moved beyond the digital world! Over the past 7 days, something truly amazing has taken place. More than 50 people around the world, who met each other through a FREE mobile app, stepped out of the digital world to create music and memories together in real life. Of course the Mobile app that brought them together was Sing! Karaoke by Smule, and these people are particularly amazing and outgoing to begin with, but it gives me goosebumps nonetheless! It has been my absolute pleasure to witness first hand the evolution of this budding community of Singers, Musicians, Mothers, Fathers, Friends, Families, Techies and Non Techies alike surrounding Smule’s social music making app. So many personalities from so many walks of life are represented in this community and words don’t describe how inspiring it is to see them bonding over something like creating music and a shared interest in self expression. This is what Smule set out to develop over 5 years ago and it’s surreal to think that it is actually happening! Here’s a Sing! Meetups Welcome Message from some of the LA crew: http://www.smule.com/p/112842052_17774395 LOS ANGELES MEETUP RECAP I flew to Los Angeles last Wednesday to attend the meetup in LA. After getting a rental car and briefly meeting up with David Leon of the Voice of Life project (who was kind enough to let me crash at his lovely abode in the Hollywood hills) I drove to San Bernardino to pick up Tino (aka Ponce). Little did I know that with traffic, the round trip effort would take 4 hours, but it was worth every second. What would an LA meetup be without the superstar that is Tino!? The meetup was originally supposed to take place at The Parlor Hollywood (huge shout out to Mary and Brooke for scouting out places ahead of time) where Wednesday evening Karaoke is hosted by Trevor Penick from the boy band O-Town. When we arrived though, to our dismay, we found that the venue had been booked for a special event so there wouldn’t be karaoke that evening. I have to say this took the wind out of our sales pretty quickly, but someone said Key and Peele had been sighted on the premises and that the event must have been booked by them last minute to celebrate their new TV show on Comedy Central. Ohhhhhh Los Angeles! Thankfully the crew rallied and we found an alternate karaoke place in Korea Town. Somehow after figuring out how to get their cars out of Valet parking (another LA thing) everyone arrived at the new place only to find it had hardly any songs in English! HAHA! But Brooke and Mary knew of a place just around the corner called the Brass Monkey Cafe (which they had scouted out ahead of time as well) and that turned out to be the BEST possible karaoke place for our large group of 18 people! Once we settled in, with T-Shirts and drinks distributed, a grand time was had by all. It was so cool to see these people singing in real life. I finally had faces for the voices I had only ever heard online. Speaking of faces, I met a lot of Sing!ers that I didn’t know before the meetup, some of which had never sang in an open Karaoke bar before, but you wouldn’t have known because everyone of them seemed like a pro. Mary and Brooke even sang a mashup that they had perfected on the app, which was something I think the KJ had never seen happen before! And at one point the whole place turned into a dance party when someone not in our group sang Ignition (remix) by R. Kelly. It is always so cool to see the song selections that people make and the responses that come from these selections. This is something I noticed first at last month’s NYC meetup. The bar closed at 2am and a handful of us crazy Sing!ers were there until the end. Considering most of these people had never met in real life before, it made sense! The next day people were posting pictures and videos from the event in the Smule Sing! Meetups Group on Facebook and I hope more meetups will follow OTHER MEETUPS AROUND THE WORLD In the following days, more pictures and videos poured in from the other Meetups around the world. Indonesia, Singapore, and Orlando all had representatives of the Sing!dom meeting up and rocking out on karaoke. Sporting their Smule T-shirts and having a good time :) What a magical place this app is! Here’s to the Sing!dom and connecting people all around the world through music, both online and in real life! Of course, if you are reading this and are interested in attending or planning a meetup in YOUR city or area, join the Smule Sing! meetups group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SmuleSingMeetups/ We’ll even send you T-Shirts! TK
Zoom Info
THE FACES OF SMULE — From Singapore to Orlando, the Sing!dom has moved beyond the digital world! Over the past 7 days, something truly amazing has taken place. More than 50 people around the world, who met each other through a FREE mobile app, stepped out of the digital world to create music and memories together in real life. Of course the Mobile app that brought them together was Sing! Karaoke by Smule, and these people are particularly amazing and outgoing to begin with, but it gives me goosebumps nonetheless! It has been my absolute pleasure to witness first hand the evolution of this budding community of Singers, Musicians, Mothers, Fathers, Friends, Families, Techies and Non Techies alike surrounding Smule’s social music making app. So many personalities from so many walks of life are represented in this community and words don’t describe how inspiring it is to see them bonding over something like creating music and a shared interest in self expression. This is what Smule set out to develop over 5 years ago and it’s surreal to think that it is actually happening! Here’s a Sing! Meetups Welcome Message from some of the LA crew: http://www.smule.com/p/112842052_17774395 LOS ANGELES MEETUP RECAP I flew to Los Angeles last Wednesday to attend the meetup in LA. After getting a rental car and briefly meeting up with David Leon of the Voice of Life project (who was kind enough to let me crash at his lovely abode in the Hollywood hills) I drove to San Bernardino to pick up Tino (aka Ponce). Little did I know that with traffic, the round trip effort would take 4 hours, but it was worth every second. What would an LA meetup be without the superstar that is Tino!? The meetup was originally supposed to take place at The Parlor Hollywood (huge shout out to Mary and Brooke for scouting out places ahead of time) where Wednesday evening Karaoke is hosted by Trevor Penick from the boy band O-Town. When we arrived though, to our dismay, we found that the venue had been booked for a special event so there wouldn’t be karaoke that evening. I have to say this took the wind out of our sales pretty quickly, but someone said Key and Peele had been sighted on the premises and that the event must have been booked by them last minute to celebrate their new TV show on Comedy Central. Ohhhhhh Los Angeles! Thankfully the crew rallied and we found an alternate karaoke place in Korea Town. Somehow after figuring out how to get their cars out of Valet parking (another LA thing) everyone arrived at the new place only to find it had hardly any songs in English! HAHA! But Brooke and Mary knew of a place just around the corner called the Brass Monkey Cafe (which they had scouted out ahead of time as well) and that turned out to be the BEST possible karaoke place for our large group of 18 people! Once we settled in, with T-Shirts and drinks distributed, a grand time was had by all. It was so cool to see these people singing in real life. I finally had faces for the voices I had only ever heard online. Speaking of faces, I met a lot of Sing!ers that I didn’t know before the meetup, some of which had never sang in an open Karaoke bar before, but you wouldn’t have known because everyone of them seemed like a pro. Mary and Brooke even sang a mashup that they had perfected on the app, which was something I think the KJ had never seen happen before! And at one point the whole place turned into a dance party when someone not in our group sang Ignition (remix) by R. Kelly. It is always so cool to see the song selections that people make and the responses that come from these selections. This is something I noticed first at last month’s NYC meetup. The bar closed at 2am and a handful of us crazy Sing!ers were there until the end. Considering most of these people had never met in real life before, it made sense! The next day people were posting pictures and videos from the event in the Smule Sing! Meetups Group on Facebook and I hope more meetups will follow OTHER MEETUPS AROUND THE WORLD In the following days, more pictures and videos poured in from the other Meetups around the world. Indonesia, Singapore, and Orlando all had representatives of the Sing!dom meeting up and rocking out on karaoke. Sporting their Smule T-shirts and having a good time :) What a magical place this app is! Here’s to the Sing!dom and connecting people all around the world through music, both online and in real life! Of course, if you are reading this and are interested in attending or planning a meetup in YOUR city or area, join the Smule Sing! meetups group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SmuleSingMeetups/ We’ll even send you T-Shirts! TK
Zoom Info
THE FACES OF SMULE — From Singapore to Orlando, the Sing!dom has moved beyond the digital world! Over the past 7 days, something truly amazing has taken place. More than 50 people around the world, who met each other through a FREE mobile app, stepped out of the digital world to create music and memories together in real life. Of course the Mobile app that brought them together was Sing! Karaoke by Smule, and these people are particularly amazing and outgoing to begin with, but it gives me goosebumps nonetheless! It has been my absolute pleasure to witness first hand the evolution of this budding community of Singers, Musicians, Mothers, Fathers, Friends, Families, Techies and Non Techies alike surrounding Smule’s social music making app. So many personalities from so many walks of life are represented in this community and words don’t describe how inspiring it is to see them bonding over something like creating music and a shared interest in self expression. This is what Smule set out to develop over 5 years ago and it’s surreal to think that it is actually happening! Here’s a Sing! Meetups Welcome Message from some of the LA crew: http://www.smule.com/p/112842052_17774395 LOS ANGELES MEETUP RECAP I flew to Los Angeles last Wednesday to attend the meetup in LA. After getting a rental car and briefly meeting up with David Leon of the Voice of Life project (who was kind enough to let me crash at his lovely abode in the Hollywood hills) I drove to San Bernardino to pick up Tino (aka Ponce). Little did I know that with traffic, the round trip effort would take 4 hours, but it was worth every second. What would an LA meetup be without the superstar that is Tino!? The meetup was originally supposed to take place at The Parlor Hollywood (huge shout out to Mary and Brooke for scouting out places ahead of time) where Wednesday evening Karaoke is hosted by Trevor Penick from the boy band O-Town. When we arrived though, to our dismay, we found that the venue had been booked for a special event so there wouldn’t be karaoke that evening. I have to say this took the wind out of our sales pretty quickly, but someone said Key and Peele had been sighted on the premises and that the event must have been booked by them last minute to celebrate their new TV show on Comedy Central. Ohhhhhh Los Angeles! Thankfully the crew rallied and we found an alternate karaoke place in Korea Town. Somehow after figuring out how to get their cars out of Valet parking (another LA thing) everyone arrived at the new place only to find it had hardly any songs in English! HAHA! But Brooke and Mary knew of a place just around the corner called the Brass Monkey Cafe (which they had scouted out ahead of time as well) and that turned out to be the BEST possible karaoke place for our large group of 18 people! Once we settled in, with T-Shirts and drinks distributed, a grand time was had by all. It was so cool to see these people singing in real life. I finally had faces for the voices I had only ever heard online. Speaking of faces, I met a lot of Sing!ers that I didn’t know before the meetup, some of which had never sang in an open Karaoke bar before, but you wouldn’t have known because everyone of them seemed like a pro. Mary and Brooke even sang a mashup that they had perfected on the app, which was something I think the KJ had never seen happen before! And at one point the whole place turned into a dance party when someone not in our group sang Ignition (remix) by R. Kelly. It is always so cool to see the song selections that people make and the responses that come from these selections. This is something I noticed first at last month’s NYC meetup. The bar closed at 2am and a handful of us crazy Sing!ers were there until the end. Considering most of these people had never met in real life before, it made sense! The next day people were posting pictures and videos from the event in the Smule Sing! Meetups Group on Facebook and I hope more meetups will follow OTHER MEETUPS AROUND THE WORLD In the following days, more pictures and videos poured in from the other Meetups around the world. Indonesia, Singapore, and Orlando all had representatives of the Sing!dom meeting up and rocking out on karaoke. Sporting their Smule T-shirts and having a good time :) What a magical place this app is! Here’s to the Sing!dom and connecting people all around the world through music, both online and in real life! Of course, if you are reading this and are interested in attending or planning a meetup in YOUR city or area, join the Smule Sing! meetups group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SmuleSingMeetups/ We’ll even send you T-Shirts! TK
Zoom Info

THE FACES OF SMULE — From Singapore to Orlando, the Sing!dom has moved beyond the digital world!

Over the past 7 days, something truly amazing has taken place. More than 50 people around the world, who met each other through a FREE mobile app, stepped out of the digital world to create music and memories together in real life. Of course the Mobile app that brought them together was Sing! Karaoke by Smule, and these people are particularly amazing and outgoing to begin with, but it gives me goosebumps nonetheless!

It has been my absolute pleasure to witness first hand the evolution of this budding community of Singers, Musicians, Mothers, Fathers, Friends, Families, Techies and Non Techies alike surrounding Smule’s social music making app. So many personalities from so many walks of life are represented in this community and words don’t describe how inspiring it is to see them bonding over something like creating music and a shared interest in self expression. This is what Smule set out to develop over 5 years ago and it’s surreal to think that it is actually happening!

Here’s a Sing! Meetups Welcome Message from some of the LA crew: http://www.smule.com/p/112842052_17774395

LOS ANGELES MEETUP RECAP

I flew to Los Angeles last Wednesday to attend the meetup in LA. After getting a rental car and briefly meeting up with David Leon of the Voice of Life project (who was kind enough to let me crash at his lovely abode in the Hollywood hills) I drove to San Bernardino to pick up Tino (aka Ponce). Little did I know that with traffic, the round trip effort would take 4 hours, but it was worth every second. What would an LA meetup be without the superstar that is Tino!?

The meetup was originally supposed to take place at The Parlor Hollywood (huge shout out to Mary and Brooke for scouting out places ahead of time) where Wednesday evening Karaoke is hosted by Trevor Penick from the boy band O-Town. When we arrived though, to our dismay, we found that the venue had been booked for a special event so there wouldn’t be karaoke that evening. I have to say this took the wind out of our sales pretty quickly, but someone said Key and Peele had been sighted on the premises and that the event must have been booked by them last minute to celebrate their new TV show on Comedy Central. Ohhhhhh Los Angeles!

Thankfully the crew rallied and we found an alternate karaoke place in Korea Town. Somehow after figuring out how to get their cars out of Valet parking (another LA thing) everyone arrived at the new place only to find it had hardly any songs in English! HAHA! But Brooke and Mary knew of a place just around the corner called the Brass Monkey Cafe (which they had scouted out ahead of time as well) and that turned out to be the BEST possible karaoke place for our large group of 18 people!

Once we settled in, with T-Shirts and drinks distributed, a grand time was had by all. It was so cool to see these people singing in real life. I finally had faces for the voices I had only ever heard online. Speaking of faces, I met a lot of Sing!ers that I didn’t know before the meetup, some of which had never sang in an open Karaoke bar before, but you wouldn’t have known because everyone of them seemed like a pro. Mary and Brooke even sang a mashup that they had perfected on the app, which was something I think the KJ had never seen happen before! And at one point the whole place turned into a dance party when someone not in our group sang Ignition (remix) by R. Kelly. It is always so cool to see the song selections that people make and the responses that come from these selections. This is something I noticed first at last month’s NYC meetup.

The bar closed at 2am and a handful of us crazy Sing!ers were there until the end. Considering most of these people had never met in real life before, it made sense! The next day people were posting pictures and videos from the event in the Smule Sing! Meetups Group on Facebook and I hope more meetups will follow

OTHER MEETUPS AROUND THE WORLD

In the following days, more pictures and videos poured in from the other Meetups around the world. Indonesia, Singapore, and Orlando all had representatives of the Sing!dom meeting up and rocking out on karaoke. Sporting their Smule T-shirts and having a good time :)

What a magical place this app is! Here’s to the Sing!dom and connecting people all around the world through music, both online and in real life!

Of course, if you are reading this and are interested in attending or planning a meetup in YOUR city or area, join the Smule Sing! meetups group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SmuleSingMeetups/

We’ll even send you T-Shirts!

TK

A message from LeVar Burton - Announcing the Reading Rainbow Contest Winners!

Dear Singers,

Thank you so much for joining me in singing the Reading Rainbow theme song. What an amazing experience. Out of 3,000+ performances, these two stood out.

WINNER:

Congrats, cfraley! The warmth and connection with the song and the show are evident; your personality shined through. Great voice, lots of passion. Made me smile. I enjoyed hearing you enjoy singing it.

♫ Listen ♫

RUNNER-UP:

Congrats, tayt927! You have a great voice and are a gifted singer. Thanks for creating harmonies under the most trying of circumstances. You made me sound good, which is not easy! ;)

♫ Listen ♫

—LeVar

Reading Rainbow Contest - Finalists

Congratulations to the top 20 finalists (out of 3,300+ submissions) for the #ReadingRainbow contest! Stay tuned tomorrow for the announcement of the contest winner and runner-up, hand-selected by LeVar Burton himself!

Finalists (in no particular order):

GinaHormann —> http://www.smule.com/p/105779623_17044136

iLESTERHARMONY —> http://www.smule.com/p/105779623_16566720

cfraley —> http://www.smule.com/p/105779623_16456147

Jaynelyse —> http://www.smule.com/p/105779623_16545493

XxAmandaINFERNO —> http://www.smule.com/p/105779623_16519985

CateV + florinos —> http://www.smule.com/p/96693672_17225634

XxAmandaINFERNO + TaraChArMzOUTLAW —> http://www.smule.com/p/73728316_16536868

chaseguyton —> http://www.smule.com/p/47731060_16807279

iKINGTONEZ —> http://www.smule.com/p/68944900_16749617

XxAmandaINFERNO + XxDrewINFERNO —> http://www.smule.com/p/73728316_16516845

nikkilove3 —> http://www.smule.com/p/97286167_16541368

LadyAfrikan —> http://www.smule.com/p/104627544_16503711

XxAmandaINFERNO + RaquelRenee —> http://www.smule.com/p/73728316_16506135

XxAmandaINFERNO + Jaynelyse —> http://www.smule.com/p/73728316_16547709

iPrncssKandee_FH —> http://www.smule.com/p/74181817_16609510

Samira_UNekSTAR —> http://www.smule.com/p/50913174_16480312

marybetheresaS —> http://www.smule.com/p/85959246_17347679

tayt927 —> http://www.smule.com/p/105779623_16453133

Infinite_Jessica —> http://www.smule.com/p/54823309_16698477

-maurice

Smackathon Project - Super Sing

Super Sing is the smackathon project created by team “Born-in-the-90s,” the solo team consisting of me, Nick R. Utilizing Smule’s unique access to millions of karaoke recordings from our “Sing! Karaoke” application, Super Sing puts the user in complete control of a giant group singing experience. Watch the demo above and read on to learn more!

An Overview

The demo above shows a Super Sing performance of Call Me Maybe, consisting of 100+ top singers from the Sing! Karaoke application. Each vertical line represents a single vocal track (vocals only), ie. a single person singing somewhere in the world. In this particular demo, the mouse is moved around near the bottom of the screen to dynamically switch between individual singers (or by placing the mouse between two lines, a duet of singers). By raising the mouse towards the top of the screen more singers are dynamically pulled into the performance, seamlessly blended together without audio clipping or distortion. At the very top of the screen, all 100+ singers are singing together in a full-on Super Sing performance.

Note, there is also a Leap Motion compatible mode in the application, which allows complete control of the Super Sing performance just by moving your fingers in the front of the computer in 3D space. Perhaps I can upload a video of this interaction in the future.

The Details

As with all the hackathon projects, Super Sing was put together from start to finish in under 48 hours. To start, I used code from the Sing! Karaoke iPhone application itself to download 75 of the top vocal performances of Call Me Maybe (each of which can consist of a single singer or multiple singers, resulting in 100+ unique singers). I then used Apple’s CoreAudio programming framework to write a simple audio graph that could dynamically mix all the vocal tracks together with the background. To achieve this, all the vocal tracks are streaming together at all times, with most of them at 0 volume. Then, based on the mouse location on screen, the volume of vocal tracks are raised and lowered, shifting in real time between individual performances, group performances, and blending possibly all 100 together. The background track for the song is always running at full volume behind all these vocal tracks to create the final sound you hear being dynamically generated.

Once I had the audio working to my liking, I turned my attention to graphics. At heart I am truly a graphics programmer, and love nothing more in the field of computer science than real-time graphics and simulation. In the spirit of the hackathon, I used this opportunity to try a new graphics approach, and built the entire application on the GPU (graphic processing unit). I won’t bore you with the all details of GPU programming and the benefits it provides, but I urge you to Google it if you have the interest. Most modern day applications use the GPU to speed up complex graphics tasks in conjunction with the traditional CPU. By generating the graphics for my application entirely on the GPU, I give the CPU complete freedom to focus solely on the complicated audio rendering. This is what allows streaming 100+ vocal tracks simultaneously while also displaying sophisticated, colorful, and dynamically alive graphics.

Retrospective

All in all, I’m extremely happy with how Super Sing turned out. The graphics completely realized my vision for the user interface, and the audio mixing ended up sounding much better than I expected.

Sing Battle!! Team Awesome Smackathon Project.

Smackathon Project - Sing Battle!!

The Team: Awesome

The Members: Greg & Mike …..with plenty of TLC from Stefan, Nelson, Lynnens, Jess, Berger, and Turner.

Product Description: Singing is fun; beating your friends at singing is funner. We built a delightfully fast, competitive way to let the people know that when it comes down to laying down a verse from Lady Marmalade, Can’t Fight This Feeling, or Gangsta’s Paradise, YOU are Number 1!

Fun Facts: Who’s Number 1? Michael Berger is.