Shazam

Of all the voice recognition programs that have made their way into the App Store, Shazam is by far the best. If you are watching TV, listening to the radio, or playing music off the internet, Shazam will find for you the name of the song and will give you a few great things to do with it.

Compatible only with the iPhone, Shazam will spend a few seconds “listening” to the song being played and afterwards it will, almost always successfully, tell you the name and artist of the song. For me, Shazam always returned me the right name of the song, even if the sound quality was all staticy (I think that is a word). Then, it saves the song to your “My Tags” page where from there you can find more details on the songs you searched for. Clicking on one of the songs you tagged will bring you to the Tag Result page, on which you can find the exact time you tagged the song, who sings it, what genre it falls under, what music label put it together, and what album it is on. Plus, you get the album art right off of iTunes.

But there is more. Also on the Tag Result page are “More Tag Options” where you can find direct links to iTunes on your iPhone so that you can buy or play a preview of the song, and there is usually a YouTube link to any video that has the same name as the song. The only issue I have encountered with this application is how these links are displayed. Because iTunes has millions of songs indexed on its servers, any song you tag will give you back a dozen or more links to different songs on iTunes. The problem with this is, you can’t tell one link apart from the other, and in most cases, only one link out of the six or more that will show up is the actual one you are looking for. With Shazam already giving you every last detail of the song, there shouldn’t be any reason why they can’t narrow down an iTunes search. Plus, the YouTube video listed many times won’t have anything to do with the song, because all a YouTube video needs to show up on Shazam’s pages is a video title that matches the song title.

But still, this is a great application. It offers a few more great tools, one of them being “Take and Attach Photo” which will use your camera to let you take a picture, say of a music video playing on MTV, and save it onto your Tag Result page. You can also “Attach Album Photo” which will let you pull a picture out of your iPhone’s Photo albums and also save it onto your tagged song. One more thing, a very quick and easy “Share Tag” tool which lets you email (using the iPhone’s native Mail application) to yourself or someone else the song title.

So, besides the minor glitches, this app is a must have for anyone who listens to music.