iOS App of the Day: Shazam
Have you ever heard a catchy song on the radio and missed the title or artist of the song? I hate when that happens.There’s nothing worse than having a song stuck in your head that you wish you could add to your iPod but can’t find out who in the world sang it. Thankfully the Shazam app for iOS solves this pesky problem. Now whenever you hear a song that you want more details on just use Shazam’s magic to identify the song title, artist, and even download it directly.
Pros:
- Accurately identifies songs with a short sound clip
- Links to iTunes Store, buy the song instantly
- Links to videos on YouTube
- Share songs e-mail
- Social feature see what your friends are tagging
- Discover new music on the top charts
- Use Shazam during American Idol to get the song lists, buy the music & more (US only)
- Save & listen again (30 sec preview)
- Watch music videos & concerts from YouTube
- See streaming lyrics in time to the music
Cons
- Low accuracy with music from new artists or lesser-known songs
How it works:
Downloading Shazam is simple and painless. You can immediately use Shazam to identify a song after downloading the app. Simply hold your iPhone up to the speakers that the song is playing from and wait a few moments for Shazam to recognize it. Once the song has been identified you can view its title, artist, single album cover and buy the song directly from iTunes. You can share the song with Facebook, Twitter, or your Shazam friends. Depending on the song you can also watch its YouTube video, access lyrics, read artist information, and get concert and tour information. Another great feature of Shazam is its tagging option. Every time you identify a song through Shazam it tags it and saves it to a list. This is helpful for when you want to look back at songs you may want to purchase at a later time.
Shazam’s accuracy is proficient. I’ve been using the app for a week now and comparing it to the information that XM radio provides to me. Shazam was able to identify approximately 75% of the songs I exposed it to. As expected, Shazam seemed to easily identify well-known music artists signed to large record labels as opposed to lesser-known artists. This sometimes backfired in my case, as it was usually the less popular songs that I was trying to identify for my personal music tastes.
Conclusion:
Shazam works well for those moments when you aren’t able to identify a song on the spot. The app’s interface is sleek and smooth to navigate through, which makes the process fun. Overall the Shazam servers were lightening fast and I only had to wait a few moments before the app was providing me all the information I could ever want on that song. I love that you can use Shazam’s other features to download the song directly from iTunes and even view concert and tour information. If Shazam could increase their exposure to lesser-known artists and songs it would make this app amazing. However, if your music preference is mainstream you should get reliable accuracy from this app.
Shazam is available for free in the iTunes Store. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 4.3 or later. iTunes Link
This is part of our iOS App of the Day series. We take our favorite app for iOS for each day and post it here for you to check out. Feel free to check out all of our App of the Day posts here.
