Just Discovered Shazam

[mjgkramer]

I downloaded Shazam for iOS some time back and never used it. Just now I was listening to The Five on Fox and one of the panel members mentioned that he uses it. I decided to give it a test. It properly identified almost everything I tried it on, failing on some VERY obscure pieces of music. One of the low volume songs it even identified that The Five was on in the background. Surprisingly it almost always properly identified the performer. Surely more than one rendition of each exists.

[RAMd®d]

I use both Shazam and SoundHound (Sound Hound?) for iOS.

Both have a fairly high success rate, but sometimes one will identify a song when the other won't.

Jazz and Classical music seem to have a higher failure rate than popular music, be it Popular or Hip-Hop or Whatever.

Lately they've both been crowded with a bunch of features, especially social networking. But they're very handy for what I want- just getting the name of a song and artist.

Only rarely has either misidentified an artist. And it's uncommon that it will misidentify a song, but it has happened.

[wurm]

Ha. My wife and I were eating at a restaurant bar Saturday and she turned to me and asked:
"What song is that?"
"What song is what?"
"That song in the background."
"Hell, I don't hear any song. Oh wait a minute. I think I hear a drum. Hang on".

So I opened up Sound Hound, and about 10 seconds later, it came up with the answer. How the hell it heard the music, playing low and buried under all the bar folks yakking, I'll never know. But I was impressed.

[JPK]

I have been intrigued by this since it came out. It has more of a novelty appeal to me and I am not sure the real world benefits it may have, but I have tried to figure our how it works and how they can make the recognition and comparison search so quickly, but have concluded that it must be just good old fashioned magic!

JPK

[rz]

I've only used it twice, and both times it worked. One was a fairly common song, I just couldn't place who it was (it was "Lucky Man" by the Verve). The other was background music on a game website that my son was on. He liked the music so much that when the game was over, he turned off the monitor and just listened to the music. It was on a loop. Turns out it was a song from the soundtrack of a movie or miniseries called "The Pacific". We downloaded it for him.

[NewtonMP2100]

a.k.a. Billy Batson......???

[freeradical]

Has it really gotten better?

It used to have problems finding anything but the latest pop song for me.