Introducing World Party

In a previous post I talked about the kara-party.com service. A party in that sense is a single house or apartment. This is great for throwing a karaoke party where you live.

But what about joining multiple parties together? This is what the World Party feature handles for you. A host can start a world party, and then other hosts/parties can join the world party. In order to enhance the experience, you will want to use video conference software to setup a meeting, and each host also joins the meeting.

How World Party Works

When multiple parties are joined in a World Party, the software distributes the songs across all of the parties. When one party is singing, the other parties are "paused" until their turn comes around again.

Many users expect the software to simply switch from house to house in a round-robin manner. However, it does not work exactly like that - it is somewhat more nuanced. The software takes into account performer count (with songs in the queue) at each house. So, for example, if one house has 4 performers and the other has 2 performers - the first house can expect to sing twice as much as the other house, but also no single performer will sing more than any other (assuming that all performers have songs queued at all times).

Video Conference Software

As mentioned in the introduction, you should plan to use video conference software to allow everyone to watch who is currently performing. There are many options available, including:

• Zoom
• Microsoft Teams
• Google Meet
• Google Hangouts
• Facebook Messenger Rooms

Some of these options are free, and some will cost.

Other options might be to use your phone with video calling - such as Facetime, Messenger, or Instagram.

Audio Challenges

One of the major challenges with a World Party is getting the audio sounding good at the other parties that are watching you perform. As this article discusses, video conference software was originally designed for the human voice and many apply technology to reduce or eliminate background noise. Although it is impressive that technology can do this, it is also somewhat frustrating when you want to include the background noise (in this scenario the music).

Recently, these software companies have realized that there are users such as musicians that want to include other sound beyond voice - and they have added features and made adjustments to better support this.

For example, Zoom added some features that can be enabled by the user to better include the music with the audio.

Zoom Advanced Audio Settings

Enable Original Sound

High Fidelity Music Mode

Turn on Original Sound

The next part of this is having a microphone that is suited for capturing the whole sound. Built in mics on laptops and tablets tend to be geared for close sound, specifically voice. This means you may not get the best result if you rely on that to capture you singing and the background music. It is a good practice to test it out and see if what you have is satisfactory. One way to do this is use your laptop to join a meeting and set it in front of the music source. Using another device, join the meeting and go to another room and observe. This allows you to tweak the settings as well to improve the sound.

If you have the interest, reading about the different microphone types may help: dynamic versus condenser mics. Additionally, mics that perform well picking up whole room sound may yield good results. Ultimately it will take a bit of exploration and research to determine what is best suited to your set up.

One other thought: hosts may find that muting their side when they are not performing may enhance the experience for everyone. Again, find what works best for you.

Party Details

Parties can join a World Party and then they join the "mix". However, what is not widely understood is what happens when a party leaves? The simple answer is that they leave the "mix". Their party continues uninterrupted while no longer being "paused" for other parties.

This ends up being ideal to join a World Party for a few songs - a "quick visit" and then get back to bringing the house down ;)  

Host Details

The host party that creates the World Party is "in charge" to a degree - they have the ability to remove parties from the world party for any infractions such as misbehavior. Additionally, parties can join and leave freely without much disruption. 

What happens when the host wants to leave? The host baton gets passed to the next party - so a World Party can continue without requiring the original host to stay in the mix.

All of this makes for exciting potential. Admittedly I have a fantasy that the World Party feature might allow the longest and most distributed karaoke party in the world...perhaps one that never stops :)

Overall, World Party is a fun and exciting feature to allow karaoke with family and friends that live in different areas. I'm sure the feature will become more prominent in future releases.

In my next post, I will be discussing a USB mixer board that makes World Party sound great while being easy, without a complicated microphone for room sound. Stay tuned.

-Chuck