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Oh, that’s what they meant. I was thinking expired invites of another singer. @mohankaus wants to bookmark a song to open in the future. Yep, that’s how I do it, too.

I didn’t think it was too funny myself since I was the one singing but I laughed. I didn’t know what to say. I honestly, until this thread today, did not know artists that we see live use the effects. I figured so with their recorded work but not live. Learned something new. Maybe I am not that bad of a singer after all. Not bragging but I sound decent with a little reverb.

I did not know that!

I find it disgusting that someone who can't even carry a tune can sell records thanks to something like "autotune".

I would only consider something like auto-tune “fake”, where someone who possibly can’t even carry a tune will sound like an experienced singer through purely artificial means. But just adding audio filters (like reverb, gate, compressor, equalizer and so on) to the voice is standard practise for music productions, whether it’s a live performance or a professional studio recording. It’s how we are used to hear music. When the original songs have these filters, why should our karaoke versions not use them? (Of course there is always the possibility to overdo it, but that is another story.)

I think that is nothing to laugh about. Almost everyone sounds better with good sound equipment and quality recording. That's why people opt for recording studios! And if smule provides an equivalent solution it is something to be thankful for.

I've been using "None". I don't want a bunch of effects added to my singing. I want to sound like myself, and when someone hears me sing in person versus on Smule I don't want them to say I don't sound nearly as good. Very happy that they added "None".

1. Go to Song Info when you listen to the invite and note who uploaded the track. Then you can search for this song by the same uploader and bookmark it for a future invite. 2. Too much to expect from smule 😁

I can tell you what I do for expired invites, if that’s what you’re referring to. I create a playlist just for those invites- another good use for the playlist feature. I hope I understood you correctly and it helped. Agree. I have a feeling Smule may be working on those features. Let’s hope🤞

I am not sure I understand that.

Two additions that are necessary and easy to implement: 1. The ability to bookmark a track for a future invite while joining an invite. Currently this is quite hard especially for songs that have many tracks… When you come across a good invite on a good track, you sometimes just want to bookmark the track for later. 2. Sorting playlists and tracks within a playlist. wont these be two lovely features?

I haven’t tried the none yet but I am going to. I noticed it today. Speaking of “cheating,” when I told someone I sang on Smule they laughed and told me the singers were all fake singers because of the reverb and that was years ago. 😂 Ever since I think of that comment when I post a song to my other social media circles. I feel almost dishonest when I use the small amount of reverb that I use at times.

I am right with you. I do not like a lot of reverb.

You seem kind and I am sure you didn’t think about the annoying notifications but, yes, there are prudes on the app who would probably block you instead of nicely explaining to you how to restart a song without saving to avoid the repetitive notifications. You learned a valuable lesson. You really should be thankful they blocked you. Happy Singing!

I would like to find a way, too. I am not a 10-year-old so I don’t care about the numbers. It would be extremely nice of Smule to rid all of the fake suspended accounts that we no longer can bump. I miss the bump. The only way to rid the fakes is to bump them as soon as they begin following, but I can’t monitor my account 24/7 and I wouldn’t think too many users can. The longer the fake accounts stay they eventually get suspended and the bump feature no longer works.

Oh, something else just occurred to me. I don’t allow Smule to send notifications, and only see the activity on my account when I open the app. But if a person has notifications for Smule turned on, it would get hella annoying when (if?) they get pinged for someone joining a song 15 times in succession. Since I have it turned off, I’m not sure if that’s something you get a notification for anyway. But it’s a possibility.

I hadn't thought of the transparency aspect. Thanks for pointing that out! I will however still argue--although I realize that this is not a top priority for Smule, nor should it be--that a suspended account should not be counted towards the number of followers. Because it's simply not a follower. Even if a real person was behind it, if the account is no longer active, it's no longer following anyone. After having read your post, I agree that it should be kept in the list of followers until the user actively removes them, for the sake of transparency, but maybe grayed out or something to give the user an indication that something is up. My main issue here is that I sadly can't find any way of removing suspended accounts from my followers list. So I can't tidy my list up the way I would like to. From a programming perspective, I count that as a logical bug. I can't imagine that it's an intentional behaviour. Then again, I didn't see the transparency perspective, so I could of course be overseeing something. But why would Smule let me block active accounts but not suspended accounts? I can't see the point. When I posted my first post in this thread, I just wanted to see if anyone else had found a way to block suspended accounts. Because if there is a way, I would really like to use it. Nobody else but me would ever care about my list being tidy... but like I indicated, I have way too much time on my hands. I disagree with one thing (and one thing only) in your post, @opentype. I'm sure that there are indeed Smule users who are happy about fake accounts following them, for the sake of boosting their numbers. And I don't think that the number of users who feel this way is negligible because then Smule would be a very unusual social media platform. Having many followers on social media is (as we are all aware) generally something people strive for. And that definitely should be part of the business model for the companies who are behind the platforms. Anything else would be a strange business model (in my opinion). That doesn't mean that Smule users who are happy to get more followers, not really worrying about whether they are real or not, are actively creating fake accounts themselves or encouraging anyone else to do it. I just think they genuinely don't mind seeing their numbers go up.

@opentype That’s a good reason that I hadn’t considered for Smule leaving the fake accounts alone. I have had people who dropped out of my lists ask me if I unfollowed them, so it probably would create more upset and confusion if fake accounts are removed. I’ll just continue to remove them myself as soon as I see them. I’m kind of confused as to how it benefits real users to create fake accounts that then follow other people’s real accounts. And why they would want these fake accounts to send flirty messages to people of the opposite sex. But I guess there a lot of things I don’t understand about how and why people do the things they do on Smule. At this point, I find it best to stick with friends I’ve been singing with for years and be very cautious about letting in anyone new.

@Anshuman I’m definitely no expert. It’s more like, I don’t know anything at all about sound quality. There are numerous threads on this forum about different configurations to get the best sound, and I would recommend checking those out or starting a new thread to ask the real experts. Personally, I use an iPad with EarPods. The reason being, I can’t hear myself if I’m wearing over the ear headphones or earbuds. And I need to be able to hear myself.

Also completely understandable why a popular singer would block someone who joined them 15 times even if they deleted it. And joins that get hundreds of fake likes/fake comments from group members are the worst, somehow these joins are usually mediocre😝 People have been known to delete joins that get floods of likes to put a stop to the flood.

In fact Elon Musk is trying to use that as an excuse to back out of his Twitter acquisition.. bots and fake users😀 They do claim it's only about 5%.. probably similar numbers for smule! At least there aren't as many fake users and bots as their main competitor StarMaker. I checked and didn't see too many fake followers on my list, although I do see users who haven't been on smule for months or years. Doesn't bother me either way. The people who subscribe to smule for years are the exception - and these are the ones complaining about all the weird changes. Even with lots of new updates the new user interface is still broken and awkward to use in countless ways! Old one was so solid after being debugged for years. And yeah there's several "dying-cat" types with way too many followers but they are usually joined by other dying cats so who cares😂

Agreed, you would be an expert in singing that I am not. Further.. the recording in its preview is different in volume, reverb etc...from the outcome after it is posted Could you please advise me a good setup with Iphone for crisp recording (iphone earbuds sound too husky ). I do promise not to stalk or harass anybody else😃

It’s pretty normal for social media services to keep suspended (or sometimes even deleted) accounts visible – at least for some time. It has nothing to do with ‘boosting numbers’. It’s about transparency. Because the alternative is even worse: When accounts just disappear from the lists, users freak out even more and they will blame the service for randomly cutting off the connections between users. I know, because our forum is full of such assertions. When a Facebook friend of mine deactivates their account, they also stay in my Friend list and when I click on them, Facebook explains that their account was deleted, so I know what is going on. Smule does it in a similar way for suspended accounts and deactivated performances (when there are copyright issues). All public social media services are plagued with fake accounts and they are actively fighting them, not creating them. This is even more obvious with Smule than with other services, because Smule is about the singing experience. That can’t be faked like Twitter messages from bots. At least I hope we are not suggesting that Smule pays people to actively join songs just so that person keeps their VIP membership. That’s not really a viable business model. Without such a scenario, what is left is the fake accounts with no or hardly any songs. As mentioned before, this is unavoidable on all social media services. Smule has lots of protective measures built in against this. But it can only limit the impact, not remove it entirely. After all, Smule must let people register and be active on the app. And so people (or bots acting as if they were people) can and will register with bad intentions. Smule can’t prevent that. They can only limit their actions and that is exactly what is happening. Years ago, it was possible to let bots create tens of thousands of likes/ comments/follows from one account in a day as a way to advertise an account. It was a huge annoyance for millions of Smule users. But now it isn’t possible anymore. Try to create too many likes, comments or follows in a day, and Smule will show a warning and remove your ability to continue these actions for a certain amount of time. We should be happy about that. But there will still be some fake accounts, spam messages and so on. It’s unavoidable. And it always comes from users of the service, not the service itself. That’s why this comparison of ‘celebrity buying followers’ doesn’t work. It’s the users who buy these followers, not the services. The services try to fight this practise, because it ruins the experience for the users and is therefore bad for business. As is obvious from this discussion. We are complaining about the fake accounts. So they are NOT in Smule’s interest.

Yeah, it’s annoying to have the same person join a song multiple times. Some people like to genuinely interact with those who join their songs, but it would be exhausting to do that 15 times over. If you’re joining a celebrity or power user who won’t know or care, sing it as many times as you like. But a regular person will probably block you for that. A couple more points: one, I don’t like people to spend more time on me than I spend on them. I do my songs in one take, so I don’t expect more than that. And two, maybe the user who blocked you has bad experiences with stalking and harassment on Smule, and blocked you as a precaution. If you make singing on Smule less than enjoyable experience for someone, that person might block you. It’s usually nothing personal.

@Nathan D absolutely the same for me. On my profile, I usually ask that people don’t blind love my recordings or share to groups and support chats. If I like singing with a person otherwise, I’ll kindly ask them not to share. If I don’t like singing with them anyway, I will block. Just my preference, nothing personal against people who operate this way. Glad I’m not the only one who suspects that Smule is behind the fake accounts. I am actually kind of offended that Smule is trying to play people like that, and I would totally complain to them. I’d think it would turn people off of the app more than anything, but as you pointed out, Smule sees the numbers from the business side, so I must be wrong.