If you hear a movie soundtrack, or background music playing on the radio or in a bar where you're having a drink, you may want to know Who does it belong to and what music is it?. To do this you just need to discover that your smartphone already have this functionality or certain apps can help you achieve it.
Fortunately, technology has already made our lives easier in this regard. Now we can easily find out what song is playing using our mobile internet.
There are various apps on the market that facilitate this action, as well as native tools integrated into the devices. It is worth knowing them all and using the one that best suits us. depending on each person's interest, given that there are certain characteristics that, as we will see below, differentiate them in aspects that we might not have taken into account.
Shazam
We start perhaps with The oldest and most popular application that came onto the market several years agoIt is considered one of the best today, to the point that Apple itself decided to buy it in 2017. This acquisition continued to allow the app to be available for both Android and Android Wear and, obviously, on all Apple devices.
Its operation is simple: after downloading and installing the app from the respective app stores, we can optionally register to store our searches and start using it. To do this, the procedure is as simple as starting the application and Press the listen button while background music is playing that melody of which we want to acknowledge its authorship.
Shazam will recognize music even if there is some background noiseOnce discovered, the application itself allows you to listen to it directly on your usual music player, such as Spotify, so you can generate a playlist of those songs that you gradually discover.
It should be noted that Shazam is free to download. A few years ago there was a paid version of Shazam Encore, which provided some additional features, but these have now been fully integrated into the recent free version.
Download Shazam for Android – IOS
SoundHound
After Shazam, it is one of the great music recognition apps that can be found on the market. Their quality is very similar and they also offer different options, such as showing the lyrics of the songs we identify or being able to add the song directly to Spotify.
But we could say that it has an extra point in its favor: is able to recognize songs if you hum them, a very curious option that everyone is interested in. There is a paid option, SoundHound Infinity, which allows you to get rid of ads among other premium features.
Download SoundHound for Android – IOS
Musixmatch
Musixmatch is another application intended to show the lyrics of the songs you are listening to at that moment. Some time ago you could find it linked to the famous Spotify, but since the Apple acquisition has made its way as a standalone program.
Like the previous one, it has a system to recognize the song that is playing and, at the same time, also shows us the lyricsThe only drawback is that its database is very focused on recent music and songs, so it will be almost impossible to discover older songs.
If you want more options, the app offers a premium model that, for a fee of three dollars, will allow you to save the lyrics offline and remove the ads. It is not Shazam, but it is a good alternative that allows you to see the lyrics of the song in real time, as if it were karaoke.
Download Musixmatch for Android – IOS
Musipedia
In this case, it is a website that Many consider it the Wikipedia of music, although it also includes some functions that allow the identification of songs. It is an open portal and crowdsourced, meaning that any user can add or remove information that feeds their database in a collaborative manner.
We have to use the microphone on our computer or on our mobile browser to transmit the song we want to listen to. It uses a somewhat obsolete system based on Flash, which can cause conflict with more recent versions of Chrome, Edge or Firefox. It turns out especially effective with older or unusual music, since it is collaborative, it incorporates songs that are not common among applications mainstream.
Access to Musicpedia
BeatFind
This mobile application is only available for Android. It has a extremely well-cared for interface and uses the ACRCloud business recognition engine. Once you have recognized a song, you can listen to it in full on YouTube, Deezer, Spotify, among others.
One of its most curious features is that the app It connects to the phone's flash and makes it turn on or off to the rhythm of the music, which creates a disco effect. Installation, like all the previous ones, is free, although as with SoundHound, it will not be free of ads.
Download BeatFind for Android
Google Assistant or Siri
Unlike the previous case, both Google Assistant and Siri are Native applications that own their own smartphones depending on the operating system they have. Both virtual assistants allow you to identify the music that is playing if you we ask the simple query: “What is playing?”.
We must clarify that these tools are a little less effective than apps created specifically for music recognition, such as Shazam. However, they generally work quite well and produce correct results most of the time.
Genius
Genius is geared towards discovering song lyrics, but it also includes a system to analyze what is playing and thus be able to find out what song it is. It is free to download and can be found for both Android and iOS devices.