Music Recognizer

Songs keep depression and headaches at bay. They help us sleep better. Songs can change our mood when we are angry, sad, or feel lonely. Frankly speaking, music is important and we cannot live without it. When the internet network was in a preliminary stage, people tuned into the local radio station and bought VCRs to enjoy music. The internet and computers have changed the picture completely. Because of the computer, we can convert a music file from one format to another. New encoding algorithms generate smaller music files as compared to old algorithms. Because of the small size of files, we can save 100s of tracks on our mobile devices.

1. Music Recognizer App
2. Music Recognizer Website
3. Music Recognizer

The internet gives us access to millions of songs. This is the internet age and music crazy people don't bother to listen to songs from an unknown artist. All they need is an enjoyable background score, soothing lyrics, or a superb voice. If you have listened to a new song at a public place, radio station, in public transport, or with your favorite music player app, but you don't know the singer behind it, download and use the following apps to identify songs.

IOS 14.2 includes a new music recognition feature. It builds Shazam, which Apple acquired in 2018, right into your iPhone. You can find out what song is playing with just a tap.

• Best music recognition apps for Android and iPhone

Best music recognition apps for Android and iPhone

Shazam

Shazam is the most downloaded song identifier app. It has a superb rating of 4.4 on various app stores. It is a powerful app that gives you access to a huge collection of songs. Despite having an enormous music library, Shazam displays song details within a few seconds. The app is so popular that famous artists such as Adele, Demi Lovato, and others use it to discover new music. Shazam offers a user-friendly interface. The UI is fast and beautiful.

• Find the name of any song and artist in seconds. Listen and add to Apple Music or Spotify playlists. Follow along with time-synced lyrics. Watch music videos from Apple Music or YouTube. Discover the most Shazamed tracks of the week around the world with Shazam charts.
• Listen to our music while viewing moving pictures!
• Check out Recognizer on Amazon Music. Stream ad-free or purchase CD's and MP3s now on Amazon.

How to make Shazam identify a song?

1. Download the app and open it.
2. You'll enter into the tagging screen aka interface.
3. Tap on the circular button with the Shazam logo.
4. Play the song you want the app to identify or hold the phone near the music source.
5. Shazam will now take a couple of seconds to recognize the song.

After Shazam recognizes the song, the application will show its following details:

• Launch date, album name.
• Lyrics, artist details.

The music recognition app displays links to music streaming services. Apart from identifying music, Shazam can recognize TV shows too. The app packs a visual recognition module that doubles up as a good QR code reader. Shazam can work as a karaoke app as it displays lyrics of a song line-by-line.

SoundHound Music search and play

SoundHound is the 2nd best app to find song names. It is also one of the greatest alternatives to Shazam. SoundHound has a superb interface. It doesn't prompt users to register an account or sign in to the app with Facebook or Google. When you run SH, you'll see:

• Black/dark gray interface.
• Toolbar with options to open search history, discover new music, music world map, inbuilt music player.
• Round button with an orange SoundHound logo.

Tap on the circular button and the app will enter into listening mode. Hold your mobile device near the speaker of the TV, PC, laptop, and wait for a few seconds. SoundHound will now recognize the song. It will then show the song's details and lyrics. SoundHound recognizes the words you speak. Hence, instead of playing a track, you can hum the lyrics of the song and wait for the app to show its details.

Also read: Best Android budget apps

TrackID

Sony Corporation, one of the biggest names in the world of electronics and digital goods owns the TrackID app. TrackID is a powerful app to find the song's name online. It works in the same manner as Shazam and SoundHound.

This song identification app shows a slideshow when you run it for the first time. The 1st slide displays brief information on the app. The 2nd slide asks you to accept terms and conditions. Tap on the 'I Agree' button to enter the main screen. Once you do so, TrackID will show a circular search button and options to:

• Open search history.
• Discover top tracks country wise.
• Listen to the live music stream.

Tap on the round button to make TrackID recognize the song and show its information. Sony TrackID does a commendable job of identifying songs. It has a well-designed music player utility. The app shows links to the song's official YouTube video. It supports over 59 international languages.

Recommended reading: Best video player apps for Android and iOS

Sound Search for Google

If you're an Android user and you're looking for a simple tool to identify a song, this music identifier app is for you. Sound Search is a utility launched by Google. Once you install Sound Search from the Google Play Store, the application will add a simple widget to your mobile device's home screen. The widget has 'What Song is this?' text. You have to tap on the text and wait for Google to recognize the song. Users can add this widget to the lock screen. Once Google Sound Search finds the name of the song, it will open a link to download the song on the Google Music Store. Learn how to use Google SS here.

Must see: Best root apps for Android

MusixMatch

MusixMatch is yet another reliable and popular music recognition app for Android and iOS. It provides many interesting features and is one of the best apps to identify songs. Unlike other apps we've mentioned in this article, MM shows options to register a new account, log in with FB or Google account, and skip account registration. Tap the skip option when you see these options. MM will now ask you to play a random song on YouTube to make you aware that it works. Once YouTube plays the song, open MusixMatch once again and then tap on its menu bar. Now, select the 'identify lyrics' option and tap the dark orange button.

Final thoughts: The 6 apps I've shared above are top-rated song identifier apps for Android mobiles and iPhone/iPad. They have an accuracy within 95 to 100%. They are free and don't ask you to create an account. You can use one of them anytime you want. As the apps are error-free, the OS on your phone or tablet will not crash.

There's probably over a hundred million songs in the world and the number is certainly increasing each day. With that number of songs, the chances of you listening to a song that you really like and not knowing the title or the author is pretty high. The old school trick in identifying an unknown song is try to catch one or two sentences of the lyrics and look for it in a search engine such as Google. This method should work most of the time but definitely not for some instrumental genres such as classical, dance, electronic, jazz…

There are apps for smartphone such as SoundHound, TrackID, MusicID and Bing Audio (selected countries only) that make it so much easier to recognize unknown songs by running the app and touching a button to start recording a short clip to perform the music recognition. As for desktop computers, music recognition is also possible through these free software or online services.

If you've heard of the popular SoundHound app for smartphones, it actually started off from midomi, a free web based music recognition service. This is why you can find SoundHound being advertised in most parts of midomi's website and even using their favicon!

Midomi uses flash player to activate the microphone on your computer so that it can capture the music for recognition. All you need to do is click on the button that says 'Click and Sing or Hum' followed by clicking the allow button when you are prompted to give camera and microphone access to midomi. You can either sing, hum or even play the music if you've managed to record it and midomi will attempt to recognize the song. Fast, no frills and easy to use since there is no need to install any third party application for midomi to work other than Flash Player.

Visit midomi

2. Shazam

Shazam is a very popular music identification app for Android with nearly 2 millions reviews averaging 4.4 out of 5 stars! Fortunately you can also find a desktop version but only available to download for Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store.

It is a no brainer to use Shazam. Run the program, click on the big Shazam icon and it will start spinning to start recognizing the music coming from your microphone. Upon finding a match, Shazam will show the album cover together with links to buy the music.

Skylum aurora hdr. Download Shazam

3. musiXmatch

The music recognition feature called 'Music ID' found in musiXmatch is powered by Gracenote and if you didn't know, Gracenote has the largest database of music and video metadata. This would mean that musiXmatch has the ability to recognize a lot of songs. The desktop version of musiXmatch is also quite similar to Shazam in the sense that it is only available for Windows 8.1 via the Windows Store.

musiXmatch primarily aims to find and match lyrics to your music tracks found on your computer. You can find the Music ID function by right clicking anywhere on the app, and select Music ID from the top menu. Then click on the microphone icon that says 'TAP TO START' to start recording the music for recognition.

Download musiXmatch

4. AudioTag

Although AudioTag's database only has nearly 2 million tracks which is nowhere comparable with Gracenote's database that is used by musiXmatch, AudioTag has successfully helped to recognize 1.5 million queries so far. It also offers a slightly different method in recognizing music which is either through uploading a full or short fragment of audio or specifying the URL to the audio file in WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, FLV, AMR, MP4 and many more.

AudioTag offers a great alternative to music recognition for people who do not have the permission to install third party apps like Shazam and musiXmatch, and also if they do not have a microphone.

Visit AudioTag

5. WatZatSong

If none of the apps or online services above managed to help you recognize an unknown song probably due to the low quality of the recorded music, your last option would be to record or upload the sample music and let the community of WatZatSong help you identify it.

Before you can post a sample, you must first sign up for a free account that does not require verification through email. After signing up and logging in, click on the POST A SAMPLE button located at the top of the website and you'll given a choice of whether to record the sample using your microphone, or upload the music file. Select the genre that you think the music belongs to and also the language. Enter any comments you have about the music and click the Confirm button.

Visit WatZatSong

You might also like:

'AHA Music' proven to be very good at identifying music from various regions {English; Korean; Vaporwave}

Better than Midomi in my opinion! Comes with 2 modes of search

Thank you for this article. Someone else found the song for me on WatZatSong by listening to the recording I made of 1 minute. Very much appreciated.

I can tell you I finally found and bought one of my 'songs' a couple of days ago after not hearing it for 24 years. It played occasionally on the radio. I did not know the author or the title, and I typically listen only to instrumental music, and the only recording was the one playing in my brain.

This particular one was 'Short Stories' by Ray Obiedo, with a distinctive bass rhythm in the first half. These trendy tools like SoundHound and Shazam are absolutely worthless for locating instrumental music sans a complete database.

Anything based on lyrics is redundant to what a Google search provides and of no value.

The real challenge is this:. You don't know the artist, you don't know the title, and you CERTAINLY don't have a recording. All you have is a tune in your head… From something you heard twice on the radio 30 years ago.

Until we get there, these tools are pretty much worthless.

Until we get there, these tools and others like them are pretty much the only chance you've got. It's either slim chance or no chance if you don't try, I'd choose the first option.

Greg & Halgoo – if it's only in your head – try downloading MuseScore or Finale… then write it as music…
then try to get that 'identified'…

You are right, John. I've worked extensively in MuseScore for my own compositions and it's probably time to do just that… Kudos on that suggestion.

'From something you heard twice on the radio 30 years ago.'
The average Radio play the same bulls**t over and over and over and over.
So what you need to do think about the genre of the song (to reduce the decade it was originally played at the radio since just because it was made 30 years ago, this doenst mean the song was created at that year) and then look at the top billboard charts and the song will be there, I heard at some research paper that 2 new songs are added to the average radio stations (that play the same stuff over and over) each week so at max you have 104 songs per year and some you will discover few seconds before it start that is not what you want.

nice articel, I once found my song within only 7 second provided, then upload it on WatZatSong, and replied in a 7 minutes for an arabic song artist and title!.

Thank you for providing such links. But they are not what I expected. I wish better. I thought different music have different frequency, so if they compare to the songs on their big song library, It may be nothing. I mean that will be way way simple at all. I am wondering that I hate cross plateform incompatibility these days. even Android phone or iphone sucks. What kind of tech, this is 2017. I hate….

Thank you very much that helped a lot …

Wow thanks to this post I discovered that musixmatch have a feature to indentify songs ♥

fantastic! AudioTag did it for me to figure out one piece of music from the movie Solace: M83 – My Tears Are Becoming A Sea). Thumps up! :-)

Tap on the round button to make TrackID recognize the song and show its information. Sony TrackID does a commendable job of identifying songs. It has a well-designed music player utility. The app shows links to the song's official YouTube video. It supports over 59 international languages.

Recommended reading: Best video player apps for Android and iOS

Sound Search for Google

If you're an Android user and you're looking for a simple tool to identify a song, this music identifier app is for you. Sound Search is a utility launched by Google. Once you install Sound Search from the Google Play Store, the application will add a simple widget to your mobile device's home screen. The widget has 'What Song is this?' text. You have to tap on the text and wait for Google to recognize the song. Users can add this widget to the lock screen. Once Google Sound Search finds the name of the song, it will open a link to download the song on the Google Music Store. Learn how to use Google SS here.

Must see: Best root apps for Android

MusixMatch

MusixMatch is yet another reliable and popular music recognition app for Android and iOS. It provides many interesting features and is one of the best apps to identify songs. Unlike other apps we've mentioned in this article, MM shows options to register a new account, log in with FB or Google account, and skip account registration. Tap the skip option when you see these options. MM will now ask you to play a random song on YouTube to make you aware that it works. Once YouTube plays the song, open MusixMatch once again and then tap on its menu bar. Now, select the 'identify lyrics' option and tap the dark orange button.

Final thoughts: The 6 apps I've shared above are top-rated song identifier apps for Android mobiles and iPhone/iPad. They have an accuracy within 95 to 100%. They are free and don't ask you to create an account. You can use one of them anytime you want. As the apps are error-free, the OS on your phone or tablet will not crash.

There's probably over a hundred million songs in the world and the number is certainly increasing each day. With that number of songs, the chances of you listening to a song that you really like and not knowing the title or the author is pretty high. The old school trick in identifying an unknown song is try to catch one or two sentences of the lyrics and look for it in a search engine such as Google. This method should work most of the time but definitely not for some instrumental genres such as classical, dance, electronic, jazz…

There are apps for smartphone such as SoundHound, TrackID, MusicID and Bing Audio (selected countries only) that make it so much easier to recognize unknown songs by running the app and touching a button to start recording a short clip to perform the music recognition. As for desktop computers, music recognition is also possible through these free software or online services.

If you've heard of the popular SoundHound app for smartphones, it actually started off from midomi, a free web based music recognition service. This is why you can find SoundHound being advertised in most parts of midomi's website and even using their favicon!

Midomi uses flash player to activate the microphone on your computer so that it can capture the music for recognition. All you need to do is click on the button that says 'Click and Sing or Hum' followed by clicking the allow button when you are prompted to give camera and microphone access to midomi. You can either sing, hum or even play the music if you've managed to record it and midomi will attempt to recognize the song. Fast, no frills and easy to use since there is no need to install any third party application for midomi to work other than Flash Player.

Visit midomi

2. Shazam

Shazam is a very popular music identification app for Android with nearly 2 millions reviews averaging 4.4 out of 5 stars! Fortunately you can also find a desktop version but only available to download for Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store.

It is a no brainer to use Shazam. Run the program, click on the big Shazam icon and it will start spinning to start recognizing the music coming from your microphone. Upon finding a match, Shazam will show the album cover together with links to buy the music.

Skylum aurora hdr. Download Shazam

3. musiXmatch

The music recognition feature called 'Music ID' found in musiXmatch is powered by Gracenote and if you didn't know, Gracenote has the largest database of music and video metadata. This would mean that musiXmatch has the ability to recognize a lot of songs. The desktop version of musiXmatch is also quite similar to Shazam in the sense that it is only available for Windows 8.1 via the Windows Store.

musiXmatch primarily aims to find and match lyrics to your music tracks found on your computer. You can find the Music ID function by right clicking anywhere on the app, and select Music ID from the top menu. Then click on the microphone icon that says 'TAP TO START' to start recording the music for recognition.

Download musiXmatch

4. AudioTag

Although AudioTag's database only has nearly 2 million tracks which is nowhere comparable with Gracenote's database that is used by musiXmatch, AudioTag has successfully helped to recognize 1.5 million queries so far. It also offers a slightly different method in recognizing music which is either through uploading a full or short fragment of audio or specifying the URL to the audio file in WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, FLV, AMR, MP4 and many more.

AudioTag offers a great alternative to music recognition for people who do not have the permission to install third party apps like Shazam and musiXmatch, and also if they do not have a microphone.

Visit AudioTag

5. WatZatSong

If none of the apps or online services above managed to help you recognize an unknown song probably due to the low quality of the recorded music, your last option would be to record or upload the sample music and let the community of WatZatSong help you identify it.

Before you can post a sample, you must first sign up for a free account that does not require verification through email. After signing up and logging in, click on the POST A SAMPLE button located at the top of the website and you'll given a choice of whether to record the sample using your microphone, or upload the music file. Select the genre that you think the music belongs to and also the language. Enter any comments you have about the music and click the Confirm button.

Visit WatZatSong

You might also like:

'AHA Music' proven to be very good at identifying music from various regions {English; Korean; Vaporwave}

Better than Midomi in my opinion! Comes with 2 modes of search

Thank you for this article. Someone else found the song for me on WatZatSong by listening to the recording I made of 1 minute. Very much appreciated.

I can tell you I finally found and bought one of my 'songs' a couple of days ago after not hearing it for 24 years. It played occasionally on the radio. I did not know the author or the title, and I typically listen only to instrumental music, and the only recording was the one playing in my brain.

This particular one was 'Short Stories' by Ray Obiedo, with a distinctive bass rhythm in the first half. These trendy tools like SoundHound and Shazam are absolutely worthless for locating instrumental music sans a complete database.

Anything based on lyrics is redundant to what a Google search provides and of no value.

The real challenge is this:. You don't know the artist, you don't know the title, and you CERTAINLY don't have a recording. All you have is a tune in your head… From something you heard twice on the radio 30 years ago.

Until we get there, these tools are pretty much worthless.

Until we get there, these tools and others like them are pretty much the only chance you've got. It's either slim chance or no chance if you don't try, I'd choose the first option.

Greg & Halgoo – if it's only in your head – try downloading MuseScore or Finale… then write it as music…
then try to get that 'identified'…

You are right, John. I've worked extensively in MuseScore for my own compositions and it's probably time to do just that… Kudos on that suggestion.

'From something you heard twice on the radio 30 years ago.'
The average Radio play the same bulls**t over and over and over and over.
So what you need to do think about the genre of the song (to reduce the decade it was originally played at the radio since just because it was made 30 years ago, this doenst mean the song was created at that year) and then look at the top billboard charts and the song will be there, I heard at some research paper that 2 new songs are added to the average radio stations (that play the same stuff over and over) each week so at max you have 104 songs per year and some you will discover few seconds before it start that is not what you want.

nice articel, I once found my song within only 7 second provided, then upload it on WatZatSong, and replied in a 7 minutes for an arabic song artist and title!.

Thank you for providing such links. But they are not what I expected. I wish better. I thought different music have different frequency, so if they compare to the songs on their big song library, It may be nothing. I mean that will be way way simple at all. I am wondering that I hate cross plateform incompatibility these days. even Android phone or iphone sucks. What kind of tech, this is 2017. I hate….

Thank you very much that helped a lot …

Wow thanks to this post I discovered that musixmatch have a feature to indentify songs ♥

fantastic! AudioTag did it for me to figure out one piece of music from the movie Solace: M83 – My Tears Are Becoming A Sea). Thumps up! :-)

Very useful info….thank you ray….

Goog article Ray. Do you know if there's a search engine for very short sound clips?

great post raymond. you are the best.

Music Recognizer App

thanks a lot

nice cool information

Nice article I'm thankful that I've found it.

Excellent post, really needed this long time ago

Yap the kind of information I was looking for it especially for karaoke type applications. Thank you again Raymond.

Thanks Ray

Music Recognizer Website

Thanks Ray. Very useful and it really works :-)

Music Recognizer

wow this is a nice article Ray. I sometimes find myself unable to download mp3 because I don't know the title. This is really great for techno songs!

Excellent!