When you hear a song and wonder what it is, Shazam is there with the answer. Hold your iphone to the musit and with in seconds Shazam will tell you the artist and track name. You can even download the song through iTunes on your iPhone. This is really cool and a must have free app!
Written by Brian Davis:
Shazam is a very straight forward app. You hear a song and you cant put your finger on who that is. Open Shazam and hold it to the speaker and within a few seconds you have the artist, album and song name. That in it’s self is great. But there’s more you can tag this song and save it in your tags but also preview and buy the song from iTunes and it will also give you a link to the music video on youtube if there is one. So many options for a free app. This is a must have free app and a great way to find that song you always wanted.
July 13, 2008
#1
Jerad: Thx for covering Shazam! It seems like a pretty awesome app. kinda mind-blowing.
Now all I need is an iPhone!!!!
FYI: while on the App Store this morning I noticed Midomi does the same thing but also allows you to Hum or sing the song (say if you’ve got a tune stuck in your head). If you’re bored
you should check it out and do a comparison. Personally, just looking at the screenshots Shazam looks better IMO.
July 16, 2008
#2
Check out Robert’s while driving review of Shazam, ha!
http://www.viddler.com/explore/sandieman/videos/435/
Thanks for the Viddler friend add Robert!
http://www.viddler.com/jeradhill/
August 31, 2008
#3
It is cool, but only works with pop music, it is weak for jazz, folk, and piss-poor for classical (I am guessing not a big part of Jerad’s collection). It has had time in noisy places unless you get right by a speaker. The technology underlying this is cool, but not that hard to understand. My best guess is that it creates a hash value based on the waveform for the sampling period which is compared to a database. Not that different from how geneticists search a large body of biological sequence with a small section. It, therefore, requires the each recording be cataloged and hashed. So multiple versions of the same some by the same artist need to hashed individually. This would also explain why less popular music is less available. SInce this work is driven as marketing tool, the cost-benefit ratio is too small to work on large catalogs of older, less popular music. It is not as I have seen in some postings that, for example classical music, is too complicated, it is an economic or licensing decision.
September 1, 2008
#4
Really? I have all types of music, Jazz and classical included and it works fine. I will add that voice recognition plays a part in quickly identifying a song but not necessary. Of course the music has to be searchable in order for it to work with the app. It’s not meant to be able to tell you the name of a song being played in a small bar outside of your city limits.
December 15, 2008
#5
I find it works on a pretty wide variety of music, but is bad with indie labels and foreign recordings.