Quickie Review: Shazam and Midomi Mobile

July 24, 2008 · Print This Article

This is a two for one review today. considering Shazam and Midomi Mobile are functionally similar (yet fundamentally different) I thought I’d group them to give you a bit of a side by side comparison.

For starters we have Shazam. that is a nifty little program that lets you “tag” songs that you like or want to know the name of. All you do is hold the phone up to a speaker, TV or wherever the music is coming from and choose “Tag Now.” The app will listen and soon after consult its library to identify the tune. When I used that, it worked pretty well, though I used an MP3 recording of Mika’s “Grace Kelly.” Even so, the results presented quickly and accurately.

Midomi Mobile offers more functionality, though at a price. You can hold the phone up to a speaker or

TV to identify music with that app as well, but you can additionally hum or sing a tune. that is particularly helpful when you remember just a snippet of a song. You can even say a song name or artist name and it will bring up a list.

However, when I tried–however badly–to sing a bit of Ah-ha’s “Take On Me” I was greeted with a list of songs in Spanish. Hmm. I wouldn’t let my singing voice be the best judge here, but the app did crash about three times in the midst of searching.