What is the app that searches for music?

Introducing Music Search Apps

Music search apps allow users to find information about songs, artists, albums, and playlists quickly and easily. These apps use audio recognition technology to identify music playing in the environment. Users can record a short sample of a song, and the app will compare it against an extensive database to provide metadata like the song title, artist name, and album. Some apps can even create playlists based on the identified music. Music search apps are incredibly useful for discovering music while listening on the radio, in public venues, watching movies/TV, or hearing a catchy tune anywhere. They provide an effortless way to satisfy curiosity about new music and expand one’s musical knowledge.

Shazam

Shazam is an application that can identify music based on a short sample played using the microphone on the device. It was created by London-based Shazam Entertainment Ltd. in 1999. Shazam uses a smartphone or computer’s microphone to gather a brief sample of audio being played. It creates an acoustic fingerprint based on the spectrogram of the audio and compares it against a central database for a match.

If Shazam finds a match, it sends information such as the artist, song title, and album back to the user. Shazam can identify music from short samples of singing, melodies, solos, riffs, beats, or even live performances captured by the microphone. Some of the key features include:

Identify songs in seconds
View lyrics synced to the music
Discover more about the artist

Create and share playlists

As one of the first music identification services, Shazam has over 1 billion installs across platforms like iOS and Android. It has integrated music discovery into devices, apps, voice assistants, cars, and wearables. Shazam continues to enhance the music experience by not just identifying songs but also providing recommendations, lyrics, videos and more.

SoundHound

SoundHound is an app that listens to music playing in your environment and identifies the name of the song and artist (Source). It has an edge over competing app Shazam in some ways. SoundHound can identify songs with much less of a track sampling (about 3 seconds) compared to Shazam (about 10 seconds). In addition, SoundHound does not consume memory after using it like Shazam does.

What sets SoundHound apart is its ability to identify songs by singing or humming them. The app listens to your voice and can determine the correct song that way. This unique feature expands its capabilities beyond solely using your device’s microphone for ambient music recognition.

Overall, SoundHound delivers quick and accurate song detection in a lightweight app. Though quite similar to Shazam, it has some advantages like faster identification, singing/humming recognition, and lower memory usage after closing the app.

Musixmatch

Musixmatch is an app that allows users to search for song lyrics in real-time as the music is playing. According to the Musixmatch Google Play page, it is “the world’s largest collection of song lyrics used by millions of people to get instant time synced lyrics for Youtube, Spotify, Pandora and more.”

The main feature of Musixmatch is its ability to display lyrics that are synchronized with the music playing from various services. This allows users to easily read along with lyrics for their favorite songs from streaming platforms like Spotify or YouTube. Musixmatch can also function as just a lyrics search engine to look up songs and access lyrics while offline.

In summary, Musixmatch leverages a large database of song lyrics in order to provide real-time, synced lyric display across various music services. This makes it easier for users to understand lyrics and sing along with the music they love.

Spotify

Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming services, with over 517K monthly listeners. It has a robust music search function that allows users to search for songs, albums, artists, playlists, and podcasts. Users can search by keywords, song titles, artist names, album titles, and more.

One of the best features of Spotify’s search is the ability to filter results by categories like genre, mood, decade, and popularity. For example, you could search for “happy rock songs from the 1990s.” This allows you to really fine-tune your search to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Spotify also has some advanced search options that allow you to search by record label, release year, and other specifics if you know them. This can be useful for tracking down more obscure songs and albums.

Another great feature is Spotify’s integration with playlists. Any search results can be immediately saved to a playlist for future listening. This makes it really easy to compile custom playlists based on search themes and parameters.

Overall, Spotify offers one of the best music search and discovery experiences out there. Whether you know exactly what you’re looking for or want to explore new music, Spotify has the tools to satisfy any listener.

YouTube Music

YouTube Music is a music streaming service by YouTube that also offers official songs, albums, playlists, and music videos from artists all over the world (URL CITATION). It provides comprehensive and easy to access search capabilities to help you find any song, artist, or lyrics by typing into the search bar at the top of the app (URL CITATION).

Some of the key search features of YouTube Music include:

Search by lyrics – You can search for a song by typing in some lyrics you know from the song
Search within official music videos – The app has an extensive library of official music videos that you can easily search through and find your favorite songs and artists
Personalized recommendations – Based on your listening history and likes/dislikes, YouTube Music will recommend new artists and songs you may enjoy

In addition to streaming audio tracks, the large collection of official music videos from various genres and eras makes YouTube Music stand out. You can watch the music videos as you listen to songs for a more immersive experience.

Apple Music

Apple Music integrates several methods for searching its massive music library of over 90 million songs and 30,000 playlists. iPhone users can tap the integrated search field to find songs, artists, albums, playlists, and more. The search capability also works across Apple devices, with Mac users able to search in the Music app using a variety of filters.

Going beyond basic song search, Apple Music shines with its human-curated playlists like the Chill Mix and New Music Mix. These expertly crafted song groupings span genres and moods, providing a more personalized music experience. Apple Music’s deep Siri integration also gives subscribers the ability to access over 90 million songs just by using their voice.

Pandora

Pandora (Android, iOS) is a music streaming app that creates customized radio stations based on your music tastes. The key feature of Pandora is its music recommendation engine that curates stations personalized to each user.

Pandora analyzes the musical characteristics of songs you enjoy and uses that information to populate your stations with similar tracks. As you thumb-up and thumb-down songs, the recommendations become more tailored to your preferences. Pandora also offers features like For You, which provides recommendations based on your listening history and new releases you may enjoy.

Overall, Pandora focuses squarely on effortless music discovery powered by personalization algorithms and data. It allows you to lean back and enjoy endless radio-style streams based on your initial input and interactions over time.

SoundCloud for Searching Emerging Artists

SoundCloud is a popular music streaming platform that enables users to discover and connect with emerging artists, especially in the electronic, hip-hop, and DJ space (New Music). It offers access to a vast quantity of user-uploaded tracks, DJ sets, remixes, podcasts and more that users can scroll through and sample by searching keywords, tags, or names of artists and tracks (Search on SoundCloud).

The SoundCloud search and discovery process facilitates connecting users to music from lesser-known, up-and-coming musicians who use SoundCloud to share their content. It lets you search through over 200 million tracks from both famous and amateur artists. Users can also create playlists of tracks they find through searching as well as follow specific artists, labels, or podcasters.

Comparison and Recommendations

When comparing top music recognition apps like Shazam, SoundHound, Musixmatch, and others, there are a few key differences to consider:

Accuracy: Tests have shown Shazam to be the most accurate at identifying songs, followed closely by SoundHound. Musixmatch struggles more with obscure tracks.

Speed: Shazam is exceptionally quick, recognizing songs in just a few seconds. SoundHound and Musixmatch take longer to return results.

Features: SoundHound provides unique capabilities like “Sound Search” to identify songs based on humming. Musixmatch focuses on lyrics. Shazam has augmented reality features.

Based on your needs, here are some recommendations:

For speed and accuracy, choose Shazam.
If you want to search by humming, pick SoundHound.

For a focus on lyrics, go with Musixmatch.

Testing out the apps yourself can help determine which one best fits your song identification needs.