Shazam with voice and lyrics
You hear that nice song and wonder who the heck is singing it? This permanently happens to almost everyone who owns a radio. Of course, there’s an app for that. And not just one. While Shazam is by far the most popular of that bunch it isn’t necessarily the best. So I went out looking for one. After testing several music identification apps I grew quite fond of SoundHound. Here is why.
The basic functionality is identifying a song which is currently playing somewhere around you. Yet, that’s by far not the only thing it does. It is capable of interpreting humming and singing, which is nice when you remember the tune. This is of course limited by your skill.
To simply find a song you can use the ‘normal’ search option. An extra is the built-in voice search, which only works in English at the moment. I especially like the developers’ statement about this:
“We are working on extending language support for voice recognition but currently it only works in English. We therefore suggest you try it with your best imitation of American accent!”
Once SoundHound identified or found a song you get detailed information. Like Shazam it includes a direct download link for the iTunes store (on apple devices) and sharing options. These include Facebook, Twitter, Email and text message. Nothing out of the ordinary but perfectly sufficient for my needs.
What makes it stand out is that it automatically displays the lyrics alongside the album information and cover image. You also get related videos from Youtube, tour dates, ringtones from iTunes, suggestions for similar artists and a list of all albums which feature this song.
The album cover sports a tiny play button which plays a few seconds of the song. This might be useful when you used the search function and want to check if it found the correct song.
To discover music simply tap the “What’s Hot” button and browse through “Hottest”, “Underplayed” (songs with little radio coverage, as determined by SoundHound) and “Just found by users”.
Another nice feature is the integration of your iPod music library. With that you can use SoundHound as media player, to find similar music and to get song lyrics.
As this app comes for free it is riddled with ads but that’s also true for the free version of Shazam (where they even interfere with functionality). Of course you can upgrade to a paid version to get rid of the apps and gain some more features.
In sum I can absolutely recommend this app. It does what it promises to do and a little bit more, packs some nice features and is available for free when you get along with ads. Well done, guys!
Datasheet:
Price: – free
System: – iOS min. 3.0
Size: – 10,5MB
Language: – English
Advertisements: – yes
optimized for Retina Display (iPhone4): – yes
Multitasking: – yes
Universal-App: – yes
Push-Notification: – no
iOS Download:
[app 355554941]
Android Download:
Android Market
Screenshots
SdP
