My experience using music identifiers

Maybe someday or somewhere while you were in a public place, such as stores, pubs,… you have heard a song that you like it, but you didn’t know which one was its name.

Probably, you already know what is a music identifier, but maybe you only know Shazam, because it is the most used app to identify music just listening to it. It is great, it works like a charm if you don’t have great expectations. If somewhere sounds a little piece of a song, usually it find a match. Usually, but it has for me several issues that make me think about possible alternatives like SoundHound. Yes, there are more alternatives like Sound Search by Google Play, but for me it was too simple.

In my opinion, one of the most important issues is the speed, yes, the time that it needs to open. The problem of the music is that it won’t be waiting for you until your app is opened, for example in adverts which takes at most 15 seconds for each one. And Shazam (if you don’t have a expensive/good smartphone) spends a lot of time to open and start tracking the song, using my phone, more than 15 seconds, and with SoundHound, around 10.

Another important issue is its recognition power. The problem nowadays is not to match an exact same song (cause it is quite easy), it is important to match similar tracks, like remixes. But if we go further, it could be great to match also if someone is whistling or humming or singing by him/herself. Those are the new the challenges. I made some tests and SoundHound works better than Shazam in those cases, but they are far away from recognizing any song sung by someone.

Besides that, tracking songs in some places will be difficult, due to other noises. For example, some days ago I was on the bus, and the driver has the radio turned on. It was sounding a song I will try to track it using SoundHound. There was a lot of noisy, the motor, people speaking, but it recognized it. For me was astonishing, I didn’t have faith it would work.

Not everything is perfect if you use SoundHound. For me, one of the greatest problems with SoundHound is that doesn’t exist an app for Windows 10, in spite of Shazam, that is a “polyglot” app. You have a web site which uses the same services as SoundHound called Midomi, . As far as I read online, and my personal knowledge, SoundHound is quite better than Shazam, less spam, it is fast, simple, and it has a better successful identification ratio. Is a good alternative to Shazam, isn’t it?