20 February,2011 07:45 AM IST | | Sowmya Rajaram
We've all suffered it. The agony of not being able to place a tune that's ringing in your head. Enter music identification apps. Hum into them on your PC or hold them up through your phone to a car radio and let them do the work. A guide to the top five
Soundhound
An ad supported service, Soundhound identifies the song you are humming. A top paid iPhone app, Soundhound has a more visual layout, and apart from letting you scan lyrics and read artist bios, it also lets you to identify songs from ambient background music and text-based search. You can listen to music through your own iTunes library or Pandora account. The best bit? You can capture FM radio, identify a song and create a Pandora Internet radio station within seconds.
Get it on www.soundhound.com. Available for: iPhone, Android, Nokia.
Shazam
Although it's been doing big news on app circuit for a couple of years now, Shazam still rates as one of the most popular music identification apps out there. A clean and uncluttered layout is supported by an impressive database that picks up almost every song you throw at it. All you have to do is capture 10 seconds of audio and feed it into the app, and voil , you have the answer to the name of the tune that's been playing in your head all day. The free app limits you to five song IDs, or 'tags,' per month, while the premium version, Shazam Ebcore, starts at $2.99 (Rs 135).
Get it on www.shazam.com. Available for Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone, Android and Windows.
MusicID
This one lets you view lyrics and YouTube videos for the song and aggregates it all together into a personal library of tagged and favourite songs. Plus, you can also email the songs that you discovered to a friend (a link to it, not an MP3 file). If community is your thing, you can see the most popular songs being tagged by other people. What real junkies will love though, is that it throws up similar songs and artists based on your search.
You can also search the entire MusicID database based on the song, the lyrics and/or the artist.
Get it on www.musicid2.com. Available for: Blackberry, Windows, and the iPhone.
Name My Tune
This one works only on your PC, and keep in mind this disclaimeru00a0-- it's not for you if you want instant results. Having said that though, it's interesting because it offers you the opportunity to be part of a community of music junkies who will work to get you answer and expect the same from you. So, you need to record a 10-second clip for others to identify, and the answer will be emailed to you, or you can listen to other people's recordings, via era and genre. And it's free!
Get it at www.namemytune.com
Tunatic
Like Name My Tune, Tunatic works on your PC and Mac. A free downloadable software, it needs an Internet connection to find the track.
Once Tunatic has identified the track for you, it also lets you buy the track and do further research on the song by including a link to a Google search box with the term (the song title) already entered. And what makes it even cooler is that it's freeware.
Get it on www.tunatic.en.softonic.com
