Title: Shazam
Developer: http://www.shazam.com
Available: Now, Android Market
Cost: FREE
Lasting Impression: You can finally learn the name of the song playing every 40 minutes on the loop at work, or playing in the car every 10 minutes!! Shazam does all the leg work for you. All you have to do is let it listen to a clip of the song!
Nitty Gritty:Â When we first opened Shazam we had two options, “Tag Now” and “My Tags”. It is a very simple but effective design.
The first option, “Tag Now” takes you to the listening part, it immediately starts listening for about 20 seconds then it analyzes the clip of music and tries to find a match. We found that it is very important to have a clear sound to analyze. We tried in a couple different areas some private and some public. In the public areas you have to go away from ambient noise to get a usable sample. In a home setting it works very well. We tried several different types of artists, from well known to independent and found that almost everything is recognized.
Once your sample is analyzed it will pull up the artist, track name, and album the song is found on. In most situations it even pulls up album art! It also gives you the date you tagged the song. We’re not sure what purpose that serves other than if maybe you were scanning multiple tracks and later you can find what you’re looking for based on when you found it. It also gives you a link to the artist’s MySpace page, a link to Amazon to purchase the track, and a YouTube link to search for related videos.
Option 2 is “My Tags”. In this section you can go back to everything you’ve tagged and follow up on things that interest you. You can also remove unwanted tags.
All in all this is a very fun app. It runs very well and gives you great information. The only thing we would have liked to see is the ability to define ambient noise and what you are trying to get a sample of. Maybe we are limited by the microphone in the G1, we’ll see.
With 6 years worth of refining, the people over at Shazam have made a very nice app worthy of the Staff Pick for October!!
