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Van Halen meets Songsmith

Somebody ran David Lee Roth's vocals from "Running With the Devil" through Microsoft's new reverse-karaoke application.

Matt Rosoff
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff.
Matt Rosoff

This is for those of you still recovering from the viral video promoting Songsmith, Microsoft's new reverse-karaoke program that lets you sing into a computer microphone, then creates a simple backing track comprised of synthesized piano and drums.

Microsoft

David Lee Roth. "Running With the Devil." Backed up by Songsmith. Listen here, and you'll never be the same.

In spite of all the scorn Songsmith has gotten in the last few days, mainly because of that painful advertisement, I think it's a pretty cool piece of software. I don't know if it's worth $30--a free download might be more the ticket--but I could see taking all the weird little ditties that our daughter sings, putting them to musical accompaniment, and making them the background music for the next photo slide show we send out. Just for example.