With the development of “smartphones” and other portable devices that do lots of other things than phone calls, quite a few song recognition services were created. It seems that most of them were primarily created for phones and such, but gladly some are also available directly from a website, and I even found one provided as a program for real computers. Here’s the list.
Note that I made it a while ago and for some reason delayed the posting of this… at that time I filtered out many poorly-working services, the name of which I forgot, although now I wish I could be more exhaustive..
Online and free
Midomi: probably the most well-known. Well, at least that’s the one I found first ^^. Sing or hum your song for about 10 seconds in your microphone, and the search is launched. Pretty good performance IMO, even though some songs are missing from the database (tested by playing the actual songs into the microphone so it’s not just my crappy singing).
AudioTag.info: to tell you the truth, the main reason I’m putting it here is because I wanted the list of online providers to be more than 1 item long. The second and last reason is because it’s kind of the opposite input compared to Midomi: in Midomi, the input can only be the microphone (so, if you have a recording, you have to play it to your microphone…). In AudioTag, the input can only be a file (so, if you don’t have a recording, you must sing into a file and then upload the file). Let’s talk about performance now: as far as I remember, I never managed to recognize a song with that. Although I didn’t tested much (and notably, not with clean song files).
Both Midomi and AudioTag are free. As in “free beer and not freemium”.
Software for PC
There is a stand-alone song-recognition program that can recognize songs only from a database that you constructed (by feeding your known songs into the program), but I forgot it, because I didn’t really find that either practical or useful.
Audiggle, on the other hand, is like an equivalent to Shazam (see below), except that it runs on a PC rather than on a smartphone. Its main drawback is that it’s not free: you get 5 successful recognitions for free, then you have to pay for further recognitions, starting at 0.10£ per song or 10£ per month with unlimited recognitions. Because of this, I didn’t try it much: I only used it to recognize some songs which weren’t recognized by Midomi. It worked for some of them. So I guess it has a pretty good recognition efficiency.
For smartphones
I don’t have a smartphone, so I don’t have much interest into those and I can’t test them either. But since they seem to be the most common kind of song recognition software, I list here what seemed to be the most common ones.
Shazam: probably the most well-known. At least, I had already heard of it before doing this research.
MusicID: I didn’t known this one.
SoundHound: seems to be from the same company as Midomi. Well, as least Midomi massively links to them. Works on iPhone, Android, Nokia and Windows Phone, at least.
Well, that’s it for today 🙂
Hi.
I need a stand-alone music recognizer, do you remeber the name?
Acctualy I use Tyberis music database, but have some bugs and the support is poor.
Thanks.
Hi,
Actually, it very possibly was Tyberis (NB: http://music.tyberis.com/) that I was thinking of, as when searching for it I noticed it still was in my browsing history. As I said, it doesn’t have any database but the one you feed it 😉 Sorry I don’t know better. Plus if by “stand-alone” you mean a piece of software that doesn’t require connection to an online database, I don’t think I’ve ever seen once, apart from those that require you to build your own database.
I’d be much interested to know if you happen to find one though, good luck in your search 🙂