In watching television you have probably heard a background song from a commercial that you recognize and can’t identify.Iphone’s Shazam can help with this. It can identify the song many times with just a snippet of information and provide a YouTube link to the song.. It also has options to send the tag to a friend, to delete the tag and to add album art.
The London based music recognition service has been around for a few years but has gained more attention with its addition to the iPhone.
Even though the service doesn’t have perfect results for identifying the song, the service is still unbelievable. If the selection is offered by iTunes a link for purchasing and downloading the song is also produced. If the song has a few versions, Shazam gives you links to all of them. For example The Grateful Dead’s U.S. Blues had 10 different links to iTunes..
The information can be shared with a friend by email with the subject line of “I just used Shazam to identify…’.
With all of this the service offers superior speed. “U.S. Blues’ had the sample recorded in 10 seconds, sent to the Shazam database and returned in another 15 seconds.
Shazam has more than 4 million music tracks, metadata and cover art and does a good job with current hits, but it success goes down with a search for classical music and music before the 1960’s.
