Games like SingStar and LIPS, on a PC

What actually happened

SingStar is off. Sony took the SingStore and the online side of the PlayStation 3 and 4 app down on 31 January 2020, after about fifteen years. Songs people had already bought still play offline, but there is no store, no online, and nothing new. If you did not already own the discs and the downloads, that door is shut.

LIPS needs an Xbox 360 sitting under your telly, and its wireless microphones, and the 360's store has closed since, so the song packs are not purchasable either. It was the better of the two in one specific way: it let you sing over music you already owned, off a device or the console's hard drive, rather than only songs it sold you.

Which leaves a genuine gap. Both of those were the same evening: a couple of mics, people on a sofa, a scoreboard, an argument about who goes next. Here is what is actually available on a PC now, honestly, including where each one expects you to get songs from, because that is the part that decides whether you use it twice.

UltraStar Deluxe

The big one, and the obvious first stop. Free, open source, explicitly built in SingStar's image, and it has been going long enough to have a very large community around it. Two players on screen, pitch bars, scoring, the lot. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Songs come as UltraStar text files: a .txt holding the notes and lyrics, sat next to an audio file, and usually a background and a video. People have been charting these for two decades and there are a great many of them, but you assemble the library yourself from various community sites, and the setup is fiddlier than installing a game. That is the trade: nothing is sold to you, and in exchange the first evening is partly admin.

If you want the closest thing to SingStar on a PC and you do not mind an afternoon of setup, this is it. It is genuinely good software.

Vocaluxe

A separate project in the same family, which reads the same UltraStar song format. The interface is tidier and more modern, and it handles up to a party's worth of singers. If you have already got an UltraStar song collection, it costs you nothing to try both and keep whichever you prefer, since they share the library.

Performous

The all in one. Vocals, guitar, drums and dancing in a single program, free and open source, cross platform. It reads UltraStar songs among other formats. If what you actually miss is a whole band night rather than specifically karaoke, this is the one that covers the most ground, and it will happily take a laptop microphone.

Browser karaoke

There are party karaoke games that run entirely in a browser now, using phones as the microphones. Nothing to install, which makes them very hard to beat when there are people in your house right now and no time to set anything up. The catch is the usual one for browser things: you are at the mercy of whatever song library the site has, and the latency is less forgiving.

Subscription catalogues

Karafun, Singa, Smule and friends are a different product to all of the above. You pay monthly and in return you never think about where a song comes from, because they have licensed a large catalogue and it is all just there. Most of them are closer to a karaoke jukebox than a game, and the scoring, where it exists, is usually the least interesting part.

If your main objection to everything else on this page is "I do not want to build a song library", these solve exactly that, and the monthly fee is the price of not thinking about it.

FullVolume

Ours, so read this with that in mind. It exists because of a gap the others leave: an enormous number of people already have a huge, fully charted song library on their drive and do not know it.

If you have ever played Clone Hero, or collected Rock Band customs, those charts contain a vocal track with the lyrics and the pitch of every syllable already in them. The guitar games never play that part. FullVolume reads the same folders and sings it. No conversion, no second copy of your library, no store.

It does the things you would expect: lyrics on screen, pitch scoring, stars, a queue so the night does not stop dead between songs, and online rooms with voice chat if the people you sing with are not in the room. It is free, there is nothing to buy in it, and it is Windows only at the moment.

So which one

• You want SingStar, basically. UltraStar Deluxe, and budget an afternoon to get songs in place.
• You already play Clone Hero, YARG or Rock Band customs. FullVolume, because your library is already charted and already downloaded.
• You want a whole band night. Performous.
• There are people in your house right now. Something browser based, and sort out a proper setup another day.
• You want to pay to never think about songs. Karafun or Singa.
• You still have the 360 and the mics. Honestly, LIPS still holds up. Keep it.

These are not mutually exclusive and none of the free ones cost you anything to try. The only real question is where your songs are going to come from, because that is what decides whether the thing gets used again next month.