You hear a song you’ve never heard before and it gets stuck in your head. Does it often happen to you? And it’s a real torture not to know its title, lyrics and not to be able to download this song. Eureka, you can identify this song by melody using free music recognition tools. Try the ones below.
1. SoundHound (iOS, Android, Windows Phone)
SoundHound can identify a song for you just by humming the melody or singing a few lyrics. The app also provides music tags to ease your search. Once found, you can buy the song from Amazon, bookmark it, access related videos on YouTube, look up the lyrics, read artist biographies, and view other songs on the album. Unfortunately, there’s no free music streaming.
2. Midomi (Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Nokia)
Midomi lets you sing or hum into the microphone and tries to isolate the tracks we were attempting to sing. You need to do it very loud, otherwise the service won’t record your humming. There’s also an alternative search by lyrics.
3. Shazam (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Nokia)
Shazam is a very popular mobile application that you may use to find song names. Simply install it, hold your phone towards the audio source and hit the Tag button to let Shazam identify the playing music. Shazam works only with pre-recorded music, so your humming here won’t work. You can identify up to 5 tracks during a month for free, the unlimited version costs $4.55.
4. AudioTag (Web)
If you have a short recording of a song on your computer or your mobile phone, you may use the online music recognition service at AudioTag to figure out the exact name of that song by comparing it with its own music database. For best results, you should either take a slice from the middle of the song or upload the whole song and the recognition engine will choose slices randomly by itself.
5. Watzatsong (Web)
WatZatSong is a social site where you can upload a short audio recording of the song (or record yourself by humming) and other members of the site can then help you guess the exact song name. The suggestions won’t come instantly but you can make their task a bit easier by proving more info about the song language or the music style. Plus, you may ask your Facebook and Twitter friends to help you with the song.