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I began thinking about music recognition technology after playing around with the “Shazam” app available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For those of you who are not familiar with Shazam, you can place an iPhone or iPod Touch near a music source (speakers, etc) and the Shazam app will identify a song with reasonable accuracy. Since I don’t have any Apple products of my own, I started looking around for similar music recognition technology that is not confined to the iPhone and iPod Touch. My search led me to 2 interesting applications named “Tunatic” and “Midomi” that I have reviewed below.

Tunatic

Tunatic is very similar to Shazam and is a free downloadable application that you can install on your computer. It’s very simple to use and all you need is a microphone to capture the music source. Just like Shazam, the recorded audio is sent to an online database where it searches for a match in order to return the song title, the author, and a link to more information. One great feature of Tunatic is that if you come across a song that is not in the database, you can upload the song with a complimentary application called Tunalyzer. This capability will ensure that Tunatic can keep growing and keep up with new music.

The best feature that Tunatic has to offer is the ability to identify music playing directly on your computer meaning there is no need for a microphone. This does not work on every computer but if your sound card has the option to send the audio output of your computer back to the line in for your computer then you are in luck. On a PC you are often able to select “Stereo Mix” or “Mixed Output” as the input which will allow you to send your audio output directly to Tunatic. On a Mac this functionality can be accomplished using software such as SoundFlower or Jack OS X which are both free! It took me a couple minutes of testing different set ups but I was able to get this to work. Now I can use Tunatic to figure out the background music in YouTube videos or other random videos I find online in record time.

Midomi

Midomi is a web based application that is a very different type of music recognition because it attempts to determine a song based on someone humming or singing a tune. And if you think about all the tone deaf people out there (including myself), you can appreciate how difficult it is to accomplish this task. Based on the testing that I have done, Midomi seems to be a work in progress but it is an incredible technology that will continue to improve as more and more people use the application and upload more recordings. See if you can find the song I hummed and uploaded to Midomi by singing the Hockey Night in Canada theme song!

Note: Shazam has recently become available to BlackBerry users and phones using Google Android.

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