How it all started

I am a pretty lousy karaoke singer. My wife and I didn't even know how to sing any tune of music until a couple years ago. I had attended many parties that, at the beginning, was just the usual food, drink, mild booze, and chit-chatting. As the night wore on, however, the party host turned up the karaoke machine and people gathered around the TV screen, consulting songbooks, entering their selection, and taking turns picking up the microphone and singing. It sounded like a lot of fun but I would just hang around the room and listen to the music, never actually singing. Most of the voices were pretty normal and occasionally, a voice would come through the high and low tone of the music -- I would have told myself that if I just heard this over the radio, I would undoubtedly believe that the voice belonged to a very popular singer. Once in a while, people requested that I sing a song to contribute to the festivity but my face would instantly turn red, babbling the only excuse I could come up with - I don't know how to sing.

So why does a guy who doesn't know the first thing about singing start writing about karaoke music  anyway? Well, I probably don't have much to contribute to how certain tunes should be performed, but I noticed right away that many changes could be made to improve the process of selecting songs - making it easier, so to speak. 

The biggest hindrance to the song selection process is the songbook itself. Depending on the collection, songbooks can be a few pages to a few hundred pages long. It's a pretty difficult task to quickly select a song, enter it's ID via a remote control,  and then finally passing the book around to other people - especially when you don't know the song, singer, or how the lyrics begin. To make matters worse, most party hosts only have at most 2 songbooks available so people must patiently wait for their turn. It is also painfully frustrating when a very "thorough" singer, who seems to enjoy going through every single entry in the songbook in minute details from cover to cover, begins looking for his/her favorite song.

Having witnessed the "thorough singer" phenomenon more than a few times, I keep telling myself that if I ever need to be occupied by a fun project, writing an application on the smartphone, with it's goal being to replace the paper songbook, would be something I'd be very interested in developing.

But then time and priority always got in the way so the project never even started...