Shazam!

I got a bunch of kinda-neat apps for my iPhone. The free version of TouchTerm works well, but isn’t anything special. Twitterific is an okay Twitter client. Pandora is kind of cool, but I wish you could put it in the background, and it’s really only good over WiFi, and when there’s WiFi, I’m almost always at a computer. Dictionaire is a nice little dictionary app, but the load time is horrendous. PW is a password wallet; I don’t use it often. “Units” is a nice unit conversion thing, but nothing special…

Shazam, though, is really cool. I listen to the radio a lot while driving, and I’ve come to the realization that, for one reason or another, announcing the names of the songs you’re playing has gone out of style. So if I hear a catchy tune I want to buy, chances are, they’re not going to announce what it is.

Shazam lets you record a brief clip of the song, sends it off to their servers, and then identifies the song. There are so many things that could go wrong with this. I figured it would be kind of like OCR software or voice recognition: a cool concept that’s usually horribly off. Except that Shazam has never, ever, been unable to identify a song. I hear a song, pick up the iPhone, start Shazam, and hit “Tag Now,” and about 30 seconds later, I’ve got the song name, some album art, and links to buy it on iTunes, as well as preview it on Youtube.

And it’s free. I’d highly recommend it for any iPhone user that listens to music.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *