Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Shazam!

No, I'm not referring to the magical word that transforms young Billy Batson into Captain Marvel. Nor am I talking about Gomer Pyle's favorite word of exclamation.

I'm talking about another app that makes me love my iPhone.

If you're not familiar with it, Shazam is a "music discovery engine" application that allows you to hold your iPhone or other handheld device where it can hear a song playing and in about 20 seconds it will identify the song, singer, album AND offer you a link to download it if you so choose, and much more.

I've had the application on my iPhone for a while, but didn't try it out until the other night when I was "holding court" in the hotel bar, getting soused with beautiful women hanging on my every word as I told wild, outlandish stories and regaled them with my life of action and intrigue.

Ok, that's not entirely true.

I WAS in the hotel bar, which is also a restaurant, but I was sitting alone having dinner and reading a magazine. See how exciting my life really is, lol? Around me people in groups or couples were talking, the TV's were on and on top of all that the bar was playing music over it's sound system. I was checking Facebook and Twitter when I thought, "Hey, what's that song they're playing? Wait! I have an application that is supposed to be able to tell me." So I opened up Shazam, clicked the "Tag This" button and then held the phone and watched it listen to and record the sound, send the clip to Shazam's database, and return the name of the song, the artist singing it, the album it was on and links to buy it on iTunes, watch a video of the song on YouTube, tweet the tag, read a biography of the artist, look at the artist's discography and read the lyrics. Wow!

I did it 5 different times with 5 different songs and it identified 4 of them. I'm pretty sure it was just too noisy in the bar for it to recognize the one it couldn't identify. But in spite of all the noise and warring sounds, Shazam successfully tagged 4 out of the 5.

Shazam! Your magic word for exclaiming when a song is identified for you.

1 comment:

Cindy said...

:P

I want an IPhone

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