Just spent some time playing around with Shazam, a new iPhone app that samples music, identifies the tune and “tags” it for you, downloading the cover art and providing a link to buy the song from iTunes. The idea is that you hear a song you like, tag it and can then buy it later. The results of my informal testing are good; out of 10 random tracks from my (somewhat eclectic) iTunes library, it managed to identify 8. The ones it had trouble with were:
- Fugue on a theme by Albinoni in B Minor, BWV 951 by J S Bach
- The Siren Songs by Thomas Feiner
It did manage to identify tracks from Jefferson Airplane, Scott Walker, Al Stewart, Radiohead, Paul Simon, David Sylvian, Prefab Sprout and Suede (I did warn you about my eclectic music tastes).
I can understand it not knowing about Thomas Feiner (it’s a new album on a small label), but the Bach one surprised me. On further investigation, it seems that Shazam pretty much fails on most classical music; it failed to tag Mozart (the Introitus: Requiem aeternam from the Requiem), Beethoven (the Ode to Joy from the 9th Symphony), all from widely available recordings. It did, however, manage to tag The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Wiliiams, so perhaps it is not completely biased against the classical world.
The final test I put it through was to put it next to my snoring dog and see what it came up with. However, it seems that “snoring pug volume IV: the late evening nap tapes” is not in its database…
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