What is it ?

Shazam is a music identification service which allows a user to simply hold your phone to a song playing in the background and the service will return you the name of the song ,artist,a link to buy the song and its YouTube video and a lot more!!!!

Does it really work?

When I first heard that there is an application that can tell you the music that is playing in background I was like maybe it can tell it once or twice or let’s way thrice but all the time! And guess what it works all the time. It is so accurate that if you don’t get a song on first try you end up thinking that maybe I was blocking the microphone and you try again and bang!!! Shazam gets it right this time.I tried identifying 3 songs in s pub and since the music was very loud I didn’t have to even hold the phone close to the speakers and it identified them accurately.I even tried this application in a McDonald’s outlet and it even worked there. The point is that it even works in places which have lots of other background noise. The songs that I have tested ate listed below –
*No love by Simple Plan
*Killing in the name by Rage Against The Machine
*Shoot to Thrill by ACDC
*Yeah by Usher

Alright agreed maybe these are the easiest songs to identify,but go ahead and knock yourself out their database is quiet large and you will find it works most of the times.

How does it work?

Curious ? Wanna know how it works ?
The process of identifying a song is known as tagging so just press the get tag button and watch the magic.
What happens is that as soon as it listens a song it create its acoustic fingerprint. It then matches this fingerprint with its database and then returns the result. A detailed description on how these fingerprints are matched can be found in this link.

Features

Apart from just knowing the name of the song,Shazam allows you to-

*Buy the song from amazon
*Get the tour dates of the artist
*Watch the video on YouTube
*Get the lyrics of the song
*Share your new find on Facebook or Twitter
*Sms to your friends
*Or mail them if you want to
*Get the biography of the artist
*Even list out the discography of the artist with all album arts.
*Displays top songs currently in a chart.
*Also has an option to see their blogs about songs.
*Lastly it also lists the sings that have a similar fingerptint.

Shazam currently comes in two versions a free one and a paid one. The free version allows you to enjoy all the premium features for 7 days after which you can continue to tag 5 songs a month for free. The premium version also known as Shazam Encore on the other hand allows you to tag unlimited songs and full access to all the features.

Shazam service is not only available for android phones but also for I phones, Blackberry’s ,PC and even as a telephone service in which you dial their number and they listen the song and its charged only if it is able to tell the correct song 🙂

Final words

Shazam is a very good application and totally worth buying the full version which costs about rs 208 and is available on Android market. It is a must have for people who love music and want to explore the ever growing music world.

We give it a 4 out of 5 solely because its not free. There’s a an app called Soundhound which provides the same service free of cost.

Shazam can be downloaded from this link.