Red Karaoke for iOS is like having ‘American Idol’ in your pocket

If you’re a Karaoke fan, you know that there’s no feeling like belting out the words to your favorite song as a huge audience watches. Well, maybe a small audience at a bar.

Regardless of the audience, singing is something that’s just fun to do, even if you’re not the best at it. Red Karaoke, an iOS app, wants to let you sing your favorite songs while recording the performance to share with a community of other karaoke lovers who will judge you on said performance.

The app boasts over 45,000 songs in its library, with plenty of them available for free. The app itself costs nothing, but if you’d like access to VIP content, you can pay $8.99 a month. Not having to purchase songs one by one is awesome in and of itself.

Sing like nobody is listening

As soon as you get your account setup, you can start looking for your favorite song. There are a lot of familiar hits here, 45,000 to be exact. Red Karaoke will display songs by free or VIP, genre, and most importantly, by popularity. As of publish time, the top song on Red Karaoke is “Rolling In The Deep” by Adele. It’s a free song, so you should have a go at it. Popular songs definitely cause me to choose them because it makes me more competitive.

Once you’ve chosen your song, you can choose to have your device’s camera recording or not, as well as switch up the tune to make things sound as perfect as they can be. Again, you don’t need to be a professional singer to love karaoke.

The song queues up and you’re shown the lyrics. The colors change on the lyrics to show you what you should be singing, just like a real karaoke bar would have on a big TV display.

It’s kind of like American Idol

In a way, performing a song on Red Karaoke is like being on stage for American Idol. Once you are finished singing, you have a choice to upload the performance or not, and allow the community to vote on it.

Most popular songs are displayed by ranking, and it’s a great way to discover other people’s performances. You can rank the performances and leave comments, making friends with other people in the karaoke community.

Unfortunately, the performances that you’re most proud of are trapped inside of the Red Karaoke app. Sharing on Twitter and Facebook with landing pages and embedded media is a must have for this app. It’s sad that the developers decided not to do this, as I would get way more usage out of it, if I could share to people not using the app. At the very least, an upload to YouTube feature would be handy.

If you like performing, and you’re a fan of karaoke, download Red Karaoke and get your friends on it too. You don’t have to sing, you can serve as a resident judge. Maybe a record label will find the next big star on the platform.