Abra-cadabra!

April 7, 2011 10:15 PM

Is there anything like Shazaam for iPhone, but better?

The app Shazaam used to be pretty great for identifying songs when you're in a public locale. 90% of the time it would load and present accurate results, to my joy. But in the past, say, six months to a year, it has either stalled out or returned no results. I can only speculate why it sucks now, but that's irrelevant. I would like the awesome service back. Anything comparable? Thanks!

posted by functionequalsform to computers & internet (9 answers total)

Also, if you tell me it's better now, I'll be inclined try again. I've just tried *multiple* times to no avail.
posted by functionequalsform at 10:18 PM on April 7, 2011

SoundHound seems to work pretty well.
posted by you're a kitty! at 10:20 PM on April 7, 2011 [3 favorites]

Soundtracking is another option, but is less of a what is that song app, and more of a hey, this is what I'm listening to app.
posted by clearly at 10:22 PM on April 7, 2011

I haven't seen Shazam stall out in a long time. It used to crash, too but I haven't seen that happen in a long time either. It easily grabs 90+% of the music I have it listen to. And the other 10% is pretty obscure. But I'm surprised when it grabs obscure stuff too.
posted by birdherder at 10:51 PM on April 7, 2011

I like SoundHound too.
posted by Ellemeno at 1:04 AM on April 8, 2011

I've seen this same problem several times - turns out the microphone was dirty on a few of them and in one case it was damaged and the phone had to be replaced by Apple.

On that note, I like SoundHound and Shazam.
posted by emjay at 3:05 AM on April 8, 2011

Just the other day, I successfully id'd a song from a youtube video played on my laptop of a DJ set in miami recorded from another cellphone. I think Shazam works pretty well.

I'd suspect a hardware problem if it just started working badly recently. Try using sound recorder and playing it back to see how it sounds.
posted by empath at 6:00 AM on April 8, 2011

I switched from Shazam to Sound Hound as well, but Shazam was mostly working for me. It was the limit on the free stuff and my uncertainty about what it was going to really cost to upgrade to just being able to punch and get a result that made me switch.

(and thanks for that suggestion, emjay; I probably need to clean my mic off.)
posted by immlass at 6:54 AM on April 8, 2011

Gizmodo recently had a blog post comparing Shazam and Soundhound. They concluded that Shazam is better for popular music, while Soundound is better for more obscure stuff.
posted by photovox at 7:44 AM on April 8, 2011