First there was I Am T-Pain app for iPhone and now there’s MicDroid, allowing Android users to auto-tune their vocals til the cows come home.
For those of you who don’t know or haven’t been anywhere near a radio in the last ten years, auto-tuning is a piece of pitch correcting technology that’s been used (and over used) to treat a singers vocals so that they’re in tune – to the point that its idiosyncrasies have become a prominent feature of songs. Now with MicDroid, Android phone owners can too join the ranks of Cher, Usher, Kanye West and about a million crabcore bands.
MicDroid records your vocal efforts and applies the autotune treatment afterwards, and saves it as a .wav file. Amazingly, you can set your vocal efforts as your ringtone by long-clicking on the recording once it’s been saved.
In the autotune settings you can change the key of the song, so if you’ve got trouble hitting that high C you’ll want to check this option. There are a plethora of other tuning settings such as pitch shifting and pull to fixed pitch, which allows you to alter the degree to which you vocals are ‘pulled’ towards the correct note, if you see what we mean.
To be honest, half of the features didn’t make a lot of sense to us, but then again we’re not professional singers or recording engineers. That said, we found that the app works best if you point the base of your phone at your mouth and hold it about six inches or so away from your face – any closer than that and you get a bit of distortion. We’ve uploaded one of our efforts below for you to get an idea of how it sounds.
It’s not yet quite as fun as the T-Pain app which automatically tunes your rhymes as you spit them yo, but MicDroid is just a work in progress at the moment so this feature could well be added in the future.
There’s a both a free and a paid/donate version of MicDroid, both of which do the same thing. If you’re feeling generous and can spare about £2 ($2.99) dig deep. The developer is currently studying at UCLA and would probably appreciate the extra cash. Amazingly, he only started working on this app just over a month ago.
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