What is it?
USNG is a free cross-platform clone of the Playstation 2 game Singstar.
Karaoke?
While USNG might be classified as a karaoke program, it is actually much more than that. Instead of just displaying the lyrics, notes are also displayed and the performance is scored based on how well you actually hit the notes. Unlike in most other games in this genre, you will also see the pitch that you are singing, so that you can see what you are doing wrong and easily (well, everything is relative) correct your pitch.
Most of the songs available also contain the original singing and actual karaoke versions are rare.
Features
- Should work on almost any platform
- Primary platform is Linux (where the development is done)
- OS X is known to work well
- Windows should be possible by just compiling the program from source (please let us know if you try)
- Playstation 3 has been tried (mic wouldn't work)
- Very accurate singing pitch detection
- Noisy environments are not an issue
- Multiple simultaneous tones can be detected and separated properly
- OpenGL-based graphics rendering
- Music videos as backgrounds
- Based on ffmpeg (supports almost all formats)
- Free software, licensed under GNU GPL
How it works?
The game records your voice via a microphone, attached to your computer. The audio is recorded and realtime FFT analysis is done on it. This analysis reveals which frequency bands contain audio (peaks). Further analysis is used to find out the exact audio frequencies inside each band, and to combine base frequencies and their harmonics into single tones. Finally, some temporal (over time) filtering is applied to the detected tones to smooth out the output. It doesn't matter if you didn't take university courses on acoustics and mathematics, and none of that makes any sense: you will get a line on screen, displaying your singing pitch.
Scoring and note types
- Regular notes: displayed in light blue (1x points)
- Golden notes: displayed in gold (2x points)
- Freestyle notes: displayed in green, pitch does not matter (1x points)
The singing octave does not matter, so as long as you get the right note in any octave, you will get full points. Singing near the correct note also gives some points, but the amount of points per second decreases as you get farther from the right tone. Singing within the right semitone always gives full points, so you may actually be off by a quarter tone and still get the points.
The maximum number of points is always 10000, but it is practically unreachable in real songs, usual scores being in the range of 2000-9000, depending mostly on the skills of the singer, but also on the song: even though the maximum is the same, slower songs are generally easier to sing.
Oh, and in case you were wondering: you will not get full points by placing the microphone near a speaker, because it will also pick up other instruments, which usually have incorrect pitch. Expect to get about 3000 points with this method :)
How to get singing?
Head over to the installation page for downloads and free songs.