So last week I was with a good friend at Starbucks when a guy sitting behind us got up, walked by, and raised his iPhone to the speaker in the wall which at the time was spouting out some sort of background music that reminded me of the kind of sound you would hear in the waiting room of a swanky physician’s office. What was he doing? Well as a blackberry user, I had no idea that what he was actually doing was using a really cool iPhone app called Shazam. Shazam, I remember Shazam as a second rate super hero that couldn’t really compete with the true heroes like Batman and Superman.
In any event Shazam is a really cool application that essentially lets music lovers like the guy at Starbucks identify tunes anywhere – using just the mobile phone. The concept behind Shazam is simple: whenever you hear a song playing and can’t identify it–on the car radio, at a friend’s house, at a bar–you activate the Shazam application on your mobile phone. It “listens” to the song for about 30 seconds, then sends a text message to your phone identifying the artist and title. Shazam’s database contains audio fingerprints for nearly 5 million songs, so there’s a pretty good chance of a positive ID. The version of Shazam for the iPhone allows you to launch iTunes directly from that tagged song and buy the song immediately.
Makes me want an iPhone!
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I know! I heard about it – what an amazing tool. The world of iphone aps is exploding!
Point of order, I believe the comic book character’s name was Captain Marvel, Shazam was what he said (or the sound he made) or something like that.
Oh, and the Shazam app works pretty well too. Although it let me down the one time I actually needed it.