At least once in our day-to-day lives, we have all faced a situation where a song that sounds so familiar plays but you just can’t seem to remember the title or the artist behind it. Worse still, a new song could get your attention and you have no details about it. In that heat of the moment, you must have wanted to find out more about this mysterious song so that you can listen to it later in a more convenient environment. It is in these situations that music recognition apps come in handy. With music recognition apps, you can easily identify songs with the ease of a button.
How do Music Recognition Apps Work?
To use, simply open the app, press the record button and allow the phone to listen to the song. It doesn’t matter whether there are existent background disturbances. The app will quickly tell you what song it is and the artist behind it. It works so well that it doesn’t matter the version of the song, whether it’s a cover or a speedup version by a DJ, you’ll still get a nailed-on result.
For context, the apps have a database containing millions of songs and their additional information. The database also includes the song’s unique sound patterns or fingerprints. These patterns easily enable the algorithms to extract information from the few seconds of the song sample. The patterns of the recorded sample are then uploaded by the app to its server and checked against the database to give you your song details. Added to this are options on where to stream or buy it. If not found, the result returned will be an error.
Popular Music Recognition Apps
Shazam: This is the most popular music recognition app used by up to 50 million people. Aside from music recognition, it offers music previews, adding songs to favorites, and also gives access to lots of information about songs and the artists. All this is aided by a user-friendly interface. Shazam also allows one to listen to samples of songs, share music with friends and find music online off Apple Music or Spotify.
Soundhound: This is the second most popular music recognition app after Shazam. With this app. You can play samples, read lyrics and locate albums songs are on. You can as well sing songs to the app and get a result – an added advantage over Shazam which is tailored for prerecorded music.
Other apps one can look out for include; the Music ID app, Midomi, and Musipedia among others.