Duets.fm Blog

With Duets.fm, all your songs, favorite singers, downloads and other customizations, stay on your device and are never sent to a server.  While this gives you great privacy, it also means that duets.fm data is not backed up. If you buy a new phone and would like to move all your customizations to the new phone, you would need a cloud backup service like iCloud or Google One.  When you use a cloud backup service, the service will give you the option to copy the apps and data from one device to another. This option will move all the customizations you made in duets.fm from an old device, to the new device.  The base data for the app would occupy only a few megabytes (about 10 MB for 30,000 songs) and would be a quick restore on the new device. But if you have a lot of downloaded songs, you might be using gigabytes of storage and the restore can take a long time. For Android users, please note that only songs downloaded to the internal storage would be backed up. 

Often, you sing the same song multiple times. Now, there is a way to see these songs in duets.fm. From the Songs tab, pick 'Repeats'. You will see a list of songs that you sang more than once. Each song would show how many times you sang them. Other details, including icons and date of the song, would reflect the last time you sang the song.  The list would be ordered by the last time you sang each song. It might also be preferable to order it by number of times sung, but that is for a future release.  If you tap on the song, it will play all the times you sang that song - by joining someone, posting an invite (OC), group or as a solo. It will not show other's joins on your duet invites, because that is not a repeat.  Whether a song is a repeat is determined purely by it's title. This would result in two kinds of errors: If you sang the same song from two different uploads, whose titles have a few characters that are different, they would be treated as different son...

In the Singer's tab, each singer's picture is marked with the follower status. Please long press on any singer for an explanation of all the icons.  A singer can be in four categories: 'Follower', 'Following', 'Both follow', 'Only I follow'. On top of each singer's picture, you will see arrow_forward if you follow them and arrow_back if they follow you. You will also see a refresh icon refresh next to 'Show singers'. If the app is in the process of updating the follower/following information, this icon will rotate. You can also tap it manually to update this information. Since this is an expensive operation, the app restricts this to be run at most once a day. If it has been less than a day since the last update, the icon would look like update_disabled . If you have more than 10,000 followers (or following), many of the singers cannot be categorized right. This is because Smule has a 10K limit on fetching followers...

There can be six kinds of songs in your Smule profile: Duets that you joined on other's invites ('My joins') arrow_forward Duets that others joined on your invites ('Other's joins') arrow_back Invites that you posted, also called OCs ('My invites') insert_invitation Group songs ('Group joins') group Solos ('My solos') person Unknown type device_unknown The leftmost icon on top of each song's cover image would be one of the above six icons, showing its type. 'Unknown type' are songs that are not included in any of the above five categories. These songs seem to have some error while they were uploaded. These songs do not play from Smule and keep spinning for a long time.   See  advanced search . Only some users have songs under this category and they have only a small number of them.   You can see the count of songs in each type from the Songs tab - Song types dropdown.  The views section in 'Song types' contains two mor...

Duets.fm is built around your safety and privacy. The app does not collect any personal information including phone number, contacts, texts, Apple ID or any other information on your device that is outside of this app.   The only information that duets.fm collects are  Your Smule ID (not the password) App usage Errors Rough location (at the city level).  Device/Operating system information The above information is needed for the app to perform its basic functions, bug fixes and improvements. You can also see what the app is approved to collect, from the App Store or the Play Store.  All this information is collected using Google analytics service, which encrypts the data before sending it to the server. Google stores the data and deletes it automatically after a few months. None of this data is shared with any third party.  The app asks permission to send notifications, but that is just to allow it to show the song being played, when the screen is locked. G...

There are two kinds of songs that add up to the total count of songs that you in your Smule profile.  The songs that you posted yourself (joins with others, solos, group songs) and the songs that others posted by joining your invites.  When you install Duets.fm, you would see at most 10,000 songs that you posted . For each invite within those 10,000 songs, you would see up to 10,000 joins from others. This 10,000 restriction is imposed by Smule.     This does not restrict the total songs in the app . Including others' joins to one's invites, there is no realistic limit on the total songs in this app.  This also does not restrict new songs that you post moving forward . The app will continue downloading them, even if you cross the 10,000 limit on the number of songs you post.  Here is a hypothetical scenario: Say, a singer joined Smule on 1/1/2013. She posted 2,000 songs from 1/1/2013 to 1/1/2017. These posts include both her joins with others’ and her ...

The first time you open the app, you have to go through a few steps for the app to set up your device with information about all your songs in Smule.  Before you start Please make sure that you are in a place with a good internet connection.  Entering your Smule ID The first step is to enter your Smule ID and accept the privacy policy and terms and conditions. The app checks that it is a valid Smule ID. Your Smule ID is what you see after the @ symbol on your profile.  Confirming your Smule ID In this step, the app ensures that you are the owner of the Smule ID that you entered. It asks you to enter a code in your Smule bio. This step ensures that others cannot use this app on your Smule account. Once you enter the code in your bio and click on confirm, you can remove the code from your Smule bio. The code is a random number generated each time someone tries to start using the app. So, even if anyone sees this code on your Smule bio, they cannot use this app on your accou...

Contextual help, also known as context-sensitive help provides help on the part of the app that you are currently interested in.  Duets.fm provides contextual help on each and every widget on the app, including drop downs, song images, singer images and each icon button that you see. To activate contextual help, press and hold anywhere on the app. You will see a popup with an explanation of how that widget works, what each icon means and other details.  These help messages also include overall information on how to play songs, search and other details. If any of the help information is not clear, please let us know.  For help on search, please see the articles on simple search and advanced search . 

Duets.fm is an unofficial companion app for Smule singers.    Many ways to play your songs   Play a random mix of unrepeated songs from your collection. Mark your favorite singers and play just their joins. Easy to use playlists.   Search and stats   Find your songs from any date range, singer or song type and play them.   Find how many songs you joined with each singer and how many they joined with you. Find which singers that you follow are not following you back.     Other useful features   Download songs and play them offline. Jump from songs and singers to their pages in Smule. Long press anywhere on the app to get contextual help.   The app is free and plays ads. It  is built around your privacy .  To discuss the app with other users and make feature requests, please join  Facebook Duets.fm group  .  You can also email us at info @quantumbytes.com.