Available on the iTunes app store for free, Shazam takes a 10 second acoustic fingerprint of a song playing, whether from radio, cinema or television, and sends it to a database made up of more than 11 million songs and quickly finds a match.
Songs are rarely unidentifiable, but most of the time this is a result of me talking during the recording or trying to record the tail end of a song. Even more conveniently, Shazam keeps a record of your recently “tagged” songs, which allows the user to go back and browse through them or buy them and have them directly added to their music library.
For me, it has been the most valuable tool for quickly identifying and keeping track of new music. Instead of frantically texting myself bits of lyrics that I remember (which are usually wrong) from a catchy song I hear in passing, I can just whip out my handy dandy iPhone, click on my Shazam app and have the name and artist in a matter of seconds. This application is actually one of the major reasons I wanted a smartphone in the first place.
Yes, I know that maybe it’s old news that such an app exists, but as I was driving down the road this morning on the way to work, bobbing my head to some unknown song on the radio, immediately Shazam-ing it to soon find out it was actually called “Trash Can” by Delta Spirit, I could not help but be thankful for the convenience of modern ?music technology.
