Sound Tool Review - Olumide Eseyin

Songify by Khush Inc.

Overview:

Songify is an iPhone music app developed in conjunction with the Gregory Brothers who became internet sensations for their Autotune The News songs and videos. It records regular human speech, auto-tunes it, and pairs it up with an instrumental of your choice. After previewing the finished product, you're given the option to share via facebook, twitter, or email. Also there's an option to upload to the "Winning" board where others can listen and rate your song.

The app is as easy to use as it is playful; simply tap the disc on the home screen to begin recording and tap it again to stop recording. In a matter of seconds, it returns a song that you can preview. It's usually about a minute long and in addition to voice distortion, your speech is also broken up in chunks and looped to sync well with the backing track's meter. If you aren't satisfied with the result, you have the option to pick another backing track or re-record your voice again.

Resources Required to Use:

iPhone/iPod, iOS

Cost and where to access:

Songify is free for a limited time.

Download here

Though the app is currently free to download, it only comes with three free backing tracks. You'll have to spend .99cents to hear your voice over the bed intruder song. Genre packs are also available for .99cents each.

What it does well:

Simple, intuitive user-interface with generally satisfactory results. Quick process with very little wait time for previewing, uploading and sharing. Social integration.

What it does poorly:

Sometimes the backing track and the vocals end up sounding really thrown together. Though this is usually the desired effect, it often goes beyond sounding amateurish on purpose into just being unusable. Really I can't find much to complain about. Songify capitalizes on the autotuning meme and like most memes, it's often funnier the more over-the-top bad it looks or sounds.