Lalaoke

Lalaoke is a web-based karaoke game in the tradition of SingStar and Let's Sing. You plug in a microphone, pick a song, and sing along to scrolling lyrics and a note highway while it scores your pitch in real time. Nothing to install and no console needed, it runs in a browser tab.

The library has over 100 songs right now, from Queen and Roxette to BTS and Olivia Rodrigo, with filters for genre, difficulty, decade and length. The more interesting button is "Add a song". You paste a YouTube link, wait about three minutes, and you get a playable karaoke version of it: the original vocals taken out, the lyrics timed to the music, and the melody laid out as notes you have to hit. That is what always killed the console karaoke games for me. You buy the disc, and the one song you actually want to sing is never on it.

Those automatic versions are good but not flawless. A clean pop song usually comes out great. A loud rock track with mumbled verses is where you notice it, and you run into a line where a word is held far too long, a note sits in the wrong place, or something nobody really sang shows up as a word you are supposed to sing. Worth knowing before you pick an obscure song and start blaming your own singing.

The singing itself holds up next to the console games. Every syllable is a pill on the highway that fills from the left while you hold the right pitch, the current line wipes gold as you sing through it, and a green dot shows you where your voice actually is. Five notes in a row starts the multiplier and it climbs to 16x if you keep it clean. Miss one and the combo badge turns red and shakes, miss the next one too and it is gone. You finish with an accuracy percentage, a rating band from Tone Deaf up to All-Star, and stars. Then it replays your own take over the backing track, which is funny and humbling at the same time. For learning a song you don't know, you can also mix the original vocal back in as a guide and move the slider while the song plays.

What is missing is the obvious thing for a karaoke game: it is solo only. No duet, no versus, no passing the microphone around, and karaoke is a group activity. It also wants headphones, because a laptop microphone hears the backing track through the speakers and that confuses the scoring. The note highway does not fit a phone screen either, so this is a desktop game. The logo says beta and that is fair.