It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was suddenly bewitched by the heavenly tones of a siren’s call radiating from the single speaker inside my favorite Starbucks. I was enraptured, overwhelmed with the sudden desire to find out to whom these dulcet tones belonged! Gripped in a fever of curiosity, I quizzed the barista, but — tragedy! She didn’t know! Would I never find the answer?
After I calmed down a bit, I realized, like everything else, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are two — one of which is truly outstanding.
Either one of these two apps — Shazam Encore, or new challenger SoundHound by Midomi — identify music by tagging it: listening to the music through a microphone for a few seconds, then uploading the clip to a database which does the actual analyzing and spits back performer, track title and album.
SoundHound seems to have a slight performance edge. At first, it seemed Shazam was able to identify a track or two that SoundHound couldn’t, but as testing progressed it became clear that, indeed, SoundHound was also identifying tracks that Shazam couldn’t. However, SoundHound does seem slightly faster, and lets the user truncate the tagging process for quicker results.
SoundHound has an even bigger advantage over its rival: While Shazam can only identify recorded music (like on an album), SoundHound can handle music hummed or sung into the microphone. It’s not great — sometimes it would successfully identify a hummed song, or at least provide a list of suggested matches; other times it failed at tests it should easily have passed, like Yes’ “Owner of A Lonely Heart” (true, I’m no Jon Anderson — but hey, I sang choir, I’m no slouch either).
Other significant differences: Shazam comes with a car mode that’s basically a bigger-buttoned, cleaner-interfaced screen; it can geotag tagged music (for a geographical tag-spree tour); and it’ll display other songs, genius-style, that match the tagged item. SoundHound allows speech-to-text artist or track searches; has a search box that can also handle lyrics and albums; presents a “What’s Hot” button that shows what other SoundHound users are tagging, and songs popular with SoundHound users that aren’t getting much radio airtime (a great way to find new stuff); and finally has a button that launches a Pandora station culled from the current tag. Both will spit up lyrics, link to the iTunes App for purchases of tagged music and let users share their tags via a plethora of social-media platforms.
For a few dollars more, SoundHound offers a rich, satisfying experience that trumps Shazam Encore handily both in performance, quantity and quality of information.
Unfortunately, only Shazam makes a free version, with stripped-down features, much slower response time than Shazam Encore and a limit of five tags per month; but it’s a good way to check out at least one of the two apps reviewed here.
And the siren? Turns out it was Bebe singing Me Fui. I’m a sucker for Latin music.
Verdict:
Shazam Encore ($5) = 3.5
SoundHound ($7) = 4.5
