Lips date, price, tracks revealed Comments by Tom Bramwell

First.
MS in "liar-liar xbox 360's motherboard on fire" claim.

I am sure lyrics will be added... not an easy problem to solve THB. They would have to find out what song you are playing and that is not straightforward. The compelling solution probably is analyzing the music and cross referencing that with a database.... a lot of possible problems there. Better not to launch that if you are not 99% sure that it will work.

I was excited about the feature of singing along to my own songs, but the way it is now it just plays your songs with a windows media player visualisation.. whats the point?! I might as well just sing along with my iPod on.

I was excited about the feature of singing along to my own songs, but the way it is now it just plays your songs with a windows media player visualisation.. whats the point?! I might as well just sing along with my iPod on.

>I might as well just sing along with my iPod on.

It removes the vocals.

It's not getting purchased until the lyrics thing is sorted out, that was what really set it apart from Singstar, now it's just a copy of a game that's been out for years with a little bit of a rhythm (shake the mic) game added on.

Hope it does well if only to put pressure on Sony for releasing wireless singstar mics asap.

if you have songs on your ipod, you should know the lyrics - losers! ;0)

@ keyboardmonkey

Wait for the review.

Also, can you get Singstar on the 360? Nope you've got to pay £300 for a PS3. Lots of people are going to pay £130 for a 360 to play this instead.

It removes the vocals.

I get the feeling people are going to be disappointed with this feature too. Obviously it doesn't use the original studio tracks, so it will just reduce the mid-range to make the vocals (and any other instruments in the mid-range) quieter.

Lots of home stereos have a "karaoke" button that does the same thing. Perhaps Lips will make a better job of it, but whenever I've heard the technique it has been distinctly unimpressive on all but very particular (less complex) songs.

So the killer feature won't be in the game? That's a no-sale for me then. Boo.

@Dizzy: Nah. Wouldn't be that big of a problem. There are already well working music recognition services on the Internet and Sony Ericsson uses it in their latest range of mobil phones/cellulars. The servuce just needs a sample of a few seconds to manage pin point the track. Lookup Gracenote and this wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrackID for more info.

It works like a charm. *bragging* I even developed some of the solution for Sony Ericsson. *end_of_bragging* :-)

Then... why M$ didn't get off with this I dunno... maybe saving it for the next round to get the license agreements right?
Hm... from that Wikiepedia entry it seems Sony has bought Gracenote... so I guess they (Sony) will be the ones with this feature then...

"Also, can you get Singstar on the 360? Nope you've got to pay £300 for a PS3. Lots of people are going to pay £130 for a 360 to play this instead."

For even less you can get a PS2 with Singstar and for much less you can just get the next SingStar version as no doubt a very significant portion of the target audience already has a PS2.

I doubt that lots of people are actually getting a 360 for this but we'll see. Anything that gets me wireless mics for PS3 SingStar is worth it IMO...

I wouldn't have thought recognising the song would be the problem, but surely there would be copyright issues? The lyrics of a song are copyrighted just like the music, so surely MS would have to pay a fee whenever those lyrics were displayed.

However if that was the case you'd think MS would have known the problem all along and wouldn't have hyped the feature.

Wrong Young MC track! Should have been Know How, not that I'd buy it anyway.

Leaving aside the singing-along-too-your-own-music mode, which I always suspected wasn't going to be quite what was hinted at - mainly because it's a month from launch and they still haven't shown the bloody thing - the tracklist is enough to seriously make me consider buying the game. Is it controversial to suggest that this is a better tracklist than any of the standalone Singstars?

As Masarin said there are lots of solutions already available that can detect the music you are playing so it wouldn't be difficult. It might however be expensive to buy the database of track fingerprints. I suspect this is the problem for MS. Not only will it cost them big bucks to implement but it also loses them potential marketplace purchases if they do it too well. The money men aren't going to like this. I suspect they will wait to see if Lips becomes a successful franchise before deciding if it's worth dealing with (something that Sony can now justify in buying Gracenote.)

As for removing vocals Skillian, that's not how it's done. You don't remove the mid-range (well not on it's own anyway.) You take the vocal stored on the left channel and use it to remove the same vocal on the right channel. Most lead vocals are set equally on each channel on a stereo recording to put the singer in the centre of the sound stage.

Some high end vocal removers work really well, considering.

As I said before, MS could really nail this by buying something like gracenote, flooding the marketplace with as many tracks as possible and implementing decent vocal reduction. I'd love it if they did as my PS2 is getting on a bit for parties and I can't afford a PS3.

@ les

I'm sure Lips will be better than the PS2 Singstar for the wireless mics and downloadable tracks if nothing else.

"I'm sure Lips will be better than the PS2 Singstar for the wireless mikes and downloadable tracks if nothing else."

Better in your opinion (as well as in mine) but that doesn't mean the average karaoke game fan would agree or if they did think it worth the cost of upgrade.

they are obviously not going to add lyric support

*maybe* lips 2 might have it

"I Wanna Be Sedated"

Holeeee Shit. This is icing on a golden cake. I can't over-state how much I want this game.

"You might think that's obvious, but back at back at E3" - doesn't anyone proofread their articles anymore? :(

@ dr_faulk: It's already available on PS3 SingStar as a download.

@ Moggsy: Well... I wouldn't say the Lips will win through DLC. As dr_faulk just demonstrated, lots of these songs are already available as DLC for the PS3 SingStar. The wireless mics might be nice, but I'm not sure about the motion sensing thing - my girlfriend might spill the glass of wine in her other hand!

It's great to finally have some competition for SingStar, but saying that Lips is going to be clearly better is a bit of a leap at this point. Sony's been doing this for years and I suspect not all those lessons can be stolen so easily. We'll see!

why would they add the lyric feature and miss out on all the extra money fro DLC.