Apple Music Sing on a Mac

Where Apple Music Sing is, and where it is not

Apple Music Sing is Apple’s own sing-along mode: on a supported song you turn the original vocal down with a slider and sing over what is left, inside the Apple Music app. It exists on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. It does not exist in the Apple Music app for macOS, and Apple Music in a browser does not have it either.

So the search that brought you here — “Apple Music Sing Mac”, “karaoke mode Mac” — has an unsatisfying honest answer: the feature is not there. If you want to sing to Apple Music on a Mac, the Mac needs help from something else.

Why the Mac does not have it

Apple has not said. There is no statement explaining the omission and no announced date for the Mac, and we are not going to invent a reason on Apple’s behalf. It may come in a future macOS release; it may not. All we can say is what is true today, which is that the button is not there.

What karanow does instead

karanow is a separate app that runs beside Apple Music. It does not modify Apple Music and does not need Apple Music to support it. It reads the Mac’s output stream — the sound already on its way to your speakers — and runs a separation model on it, on your own machine. You play a song, press one button, and about two seconds later the lead vocal is gone while the band keeps going. On a busy machine it can be closer to three seconds; after that it stays continuous.

The original singer is still available. The same separation pass produces the vocal as its own track, and a slider blends it back in at any level, which is what you want while you are still learning a song rather than performing it.

Because it works on the sound rather than the app, Apple Music is not a special case. Spotify, a browser tab, a video player — anything your Mac plays goes through the same path. There is no catalogue, so there is no list of supported songs: whatever you can play, you can sing to.

Apple Music is one of the applications that publishes what it is playing, and those get more. karanow reads the current track and its progress, and can pause, skip forward and skip back from its own window. It also draws the notes to aim at, read from the original singing on the exact recording you put on, with your own voice drawn over them from the microphone. That pitch runway carries a beta label in the app and it carries one here: it works, and it is not finished.

What it does not do

It does not supply music. There is no library and no store inside karanow; the music is whatever you already play, from wherever you already pay for it.

It does not produce a file. The backing track exists while it is playing and nowhere else — nothing is exported, saved or uploaded. If what you want is an instrumental to keep, an offline separator is the right tool and will do a cleaner job, because it can spend minutes on a whole track instead of a second and a bit on a moving window.

It does not run on Intel Macs. It needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14.2 or later; rather than degrade to old-fashioned mid/side cancellation and call it the same thing, it declines.

The short version

Apple Music Sing is a feature inside one player, on three kinds of device that do not include the Mac. karanow is an app beside the player, on the Mac only, working on the sound the player produces. If you already have Apple Music open on your Mac and want to sing to it tonight, the second one is the one that exists.