SoundHound (for iPad)

Shazam may be the face of music search and recognition apps, but it's not the only player in the game. SoundHound, an iPad??app available in both free and premium versions, aims to give it a run for its money by letting users discover content by matching a played song?or a sung or hummed tune!?against a deep database. It not only helps you identify an unlimited number of songs, but integrates music related tweets, lyrics, and YouTube clips as well. Overall, it's not quite Shazam, but a decent app nonetheless.

The Basics
You can jump right into using SoundHound without creating an account, which is a nice change of pace (you can optionally log into Facebook so that you can share links from within the app). Once the app loads, you're taken to "Charts," a location where I saw season-appropriate song snippets?such as Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"?in the Holiday Must Haves category. The song snippets, which are only a few seconds in length, give you just enough of a taste to see if you like it enough to listen to the full version elsewhere (more on that soon).

SoundHound also integrates lyrics that cover the few seconds worth of songs that play. In the situations where lyrics aren't available, SoundHound returns lyric Google Search results. That's a nice touch that I'd like to see other music apps implement.

The interface, however, is a bit busy. It could use streamlining. In fact, SoundHound's record button is tucked away?you need to first tap the home icon and then the big, orange SoundHound icon. Shazam, conversely, is ready for your audio input as soon as it finishes loading.

The SoundHound Experience
SoundHound prompts you to open snippets in Pandora Radio or Rdio to hear the full tracks. I would've preferred enjoying tracks within SoundHound instead of via an external app, but the process worked smoothly. When I tapped the Rdio icon, for example, the app opened the "Tribute to Working Class Hero Bruce Springsteen, Vol 2," which had "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" highlighted. Bringing a finger to the play icon caused the song to stream without any hiccups. Note: If you don't have either app installed, you'll be prompted to down either Rdio or Pandora when you tap the appropriate icon.

The same screen that prompted me to listen to the song via Rdio also featured YouTube clips of Bruce performing the song, a social networking box for firing off links via Facebook and Twitter, and "Album Appearances" that lets you see the albums in which the song appears. If you want to get even more out of SoundHound, plop down $6 for SoundHound Infinity which adds links to Wikipedia entries and song recommendations. There's a lot to like here.

SoundHound's song recognition, however, is the heart of this app. SoundHound quickly identified 4 out of 5 songs that I played in my bedroom at high volume (including the likes of rap, rock, and classic soul). It didn't fare quite as well when colleagues and I hummed/sang tunes. When a colleague hummed "I Wish You A Merry Christmas," Sound Hound returned Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" as one of the search results. When another colleague hummed Tori Amos' "God," SoundHound identified Justin Bieber's "Never Say Never" as one of the suggested possible tracks. On the other hand, SoundHound recognized "White Christmas" and other holiday standards. It appears that either our humming isn't up to snuff or SoundHound needs some work in that area. I like that SoundHound saves your search history so you can pull up a song name again should you forget it after the initial search.

Song results feature links to iTunes pages where you can purchase and download songs, but every time I tried to make a buy, I got an invalid address notification.

The Verdict
SoundHound goes a very good job of sniffing out the names of recorded songs you wish to identify in a pinch, but it has a little way to go before it catches up with Shazam more complete package. There are issues with purchasing tracks and its humming identification needs some work, but the app is one worth downloading if you're looking for an iPad music search tool that dares to be different.

More Music Services & Reviews:
??? SoundHound (for iPad)
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/3wXJgjoywQw/0,2817,2412907,00.asp

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