The SHAZAM Music Recognition Service

[Wingfoot]

Today's technology is unbelievable! How many times have you heard a song and wanted to get the name of the song or the person/group playing? Now there is a cool service available on iPhone that will answer these questions. It's called Shazam. Shazam has been used in England since 2002 and became available in the United States last year.

If you own an iPhone, you can use the Shazam feature to identify a song that you're listening to by using the microphone inside. Shazam will send you the name of the song and the artist and a link to download it.

Here you can install their free app onto an iPhone. Just hit the “tag now” button, hold the phone’s mic up to a speaker, and it will usually identify the song and provide artist information, as well as a link to purchase the album.

What is so remarkable about the service, is that it works on very obscure songs and will do so even with peripheral background noise; crowded coffee shops, restaurants and anywhere music is piped to the listeners.

The basic idea is exactly what you would expect; it relies on fingerprinting music based on the spectrogram.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Before hand, Shazam fingerprints a comprehensive catalog of music, and stores the fingerprints in a database.

2. A user “tags” a song they hear, which fingerprints a 10 second sample of audio.

3. The Shazam application uploads the fingerprint to Shazam’s service, which runs a search for a matching fingerprint in their database.

4. If a match is found, the song info is returned to the user. If the song is not recognized from the Shazam database, an error is returned.

Shazam is available for iOS, Android, and other platforms. The iPhone version of Shazam is available as either a free, limited download or a premium full version called Shazam Encore which sells for $4.99.

The free version of Shazam will let you identify up to 5 songs per month, while you’ll have to pay $4.99 for Shazam Encore if you want to remove the 5 songs per month limit.

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[GPGrasshopper]

The Droid version is awesome.

[sprayandpray]

That would take all of the fun out of it?