Soundhound ∞ review

Soundhound (previously known as Midomi) is a music recognition app for the iPhone and iPad app like Shazam with a few additional features. Like Shazam, Soundhound lets you record any short sound sample and analyzes the audio to find the Artist, Song, and Album name. But this is where the similarities with Shazam ends, as Soundhound throws in the kitchen sink when it comes to music recognition apps.

Soundhound can find popular songs in as little as 4 seconds but can also scan longer to find less mainstream song titles. Soundhound is also able to listen to your voice humming lyrics of a song or just saying the artist name and use that bit of audio to find tracks you’re searching for. It also handles pure text searching for Album, Lyrics, Artist or Song name. Sound hound can scan the music in the Now Playing portion of your iPhone’s iPod Library and it even fetches lyrics for popular songs. Soundhound has a built in community feature that tracks where the tracks found by other member are displayed by popularity. This is a simple and effective way to discover new music related to your existing taste, as well as trying out top trending tracks in various other genres.

Finally in Soundhound for iPhone and iPad you can listen to samples of songs just like in iTunes and browse a linked database of any Artist’s Top Songs, Albums, Biography, Music Videos, Tour dates and Similar Artists. When you find a song that you already have on your iPod library, Soundhound automatically lets you play the entire song from within the app. Actually there is a full iPod audio player built into Soundhound. The history in Soundhound maintains a list of tracks you’ve recently found, and or bookmarked.

Going to the Soundhound settings, via the iPhone’s general settings section lets you customize a few of the apps features. Here you can disable the vibrate on result match, enable Bluetooth, and fast app switching features, amongst other options. Soundhound is multitasking friendly and honors remembering your position and returning to where you left off.

Overall, Soundhound is a must-have iPhone and iPad app for music enthusiast. It is elegantly designed, fast, tightly integrated, and a powerful music discovery utility. The only area where the app could use some improvement is its price. With the paid version of Soundhound ∞ you pay $4.99 and get unlimited usage. A free nag supported version of Soundhound exists for those who want to try it out first but is limited to 5 IDs. Though you can then upgrade via an in-app purchase to get unlimited IDs.

Here is a video demo of the Soundhound app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Soundhound ∞ was written by Joe Seifi on November 15th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Fun, Music, Utilities. Page viewed 9532 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.