(This is a guest post from James Martin of midemblog. Evolver.fm is an official publication of Midem 2012 in Cannes, France, where Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk will appear on panels and judge the following midemlab music apps. We figured we’d repost midemblog’s lists of the finalists in midemlab 2012, which includes videos and descriptions for each app, in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel.)
Song2See
Made by Fraunhofer IDMT — co-creators of the MP3 format, no less — Songs2See is a Singstar-like game for learning to play musical instruments:
MPme
Built by former Shazam staffers, MPme listens to over 50,000 radio stations and matches their playlists with your tastes, notably from your own music collection, and creates sets of recommended radio stations:
ChartsNow
ChartsNow is a mobile app which scans the charts overnight to ensure you have the biggest hits on your phone every day. It works offline, and offers one-click purchasing:
Twusic
Twusic enables you to keep tabs on tracks your friends and followers are tweeting:
musicplayr
Musicplayr works in a similar way to MP3 blog music aggregator exfm, but across multiple platforms, namely YouTube, Soundcloud and music blogs:
Rexly
Rexly is an iPhone app which allows you to see in real time what your friends are listening to in iTunes. You can then listen to, rate, share and buy those songs:
WatZatSong
You know how the likes of Shazam only recognises recorded music? WatZatSong claims to recognize songs you sing or hum into your computer, notably by asking its online community:
WhoSampled.com
WhoSampled.com “allows music fans to explore the DNA of their favorite music,” by tracking songs over the past thousand years, no less! Direct comparisons of, say, how Kanye West sampled Daft Punk are just a click away:
Navegas
Navegas is a web-based music player for all music sources, be they your MP3 collection, YouTube, SoundCloud or many others. A desktop widget system makes the whole thing easily manageable:
All of the above finalists will present their services to an expert panel featuring SoundCloud, MOG, Sony, Music Ally and more — at midem Saturday January 28. The winners will be revealed at midem’s Visionary Monday, January 30.