Out of all the great things music apps do for us, music identification is one of the most helpful, not to mention amazing. No matter where you are, if you hear a song you like but don’t know, a click and some taps will usually solve your problem. Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on whether you’re a…
One reason people love Music ID apps is their immediacy: You hold your phone up in the air, tag a song, and then you know, more or less immediately, what that song is. This is one of the most magical things our modern phones can do — but even the old, dumb phones from ten…
First, if you’re not up on Audiobus yet, see our introductions to the topic in April, when the idea first started floating around — and earlier this month, when Apple approved Audiobus for use in apps sold in iTunes. The concept in a nutshell: Audiobus will let iOS apps on the same iPhone, iPad, and…
Music apps are starting to put up some McDonalds-style numbers. Today brings news that Shazam, the most popular song identification app on a number of platforms, just identified its five billionth song: Pink’s “Blow Me One Last Kiss” (embeddable player courtesy of Tomahawk): This marks a big milestone on a long road for Shazam, which…
Audio tags are looking more and more like the new QR code — not only are they way less ugly than those jagged black-on-white squares, but you don’t need to take a picture of anything in order for them to work. (See also: Shazam and the Super Bowl.) A startup called SonicNotify embeds inaudibly high-pitched…
Shazam, the fourth-most-popular iOS app of all time, plans to let Super Bowl viewers tag the audio coming out of their television sets on Sunday. Tagging audio essentially provides links to online content through your smartphone’s microphone, the same way that QR codes can link to stuff through your smartphone’s camera, except it’s arguably much…
A new generation of music fans discovered Led Zeppelin by watching the September finale of Entourage, the HBO series. Viewers who had the music identification app Shazam installed on their smartphones tagged the Zeppelin classic “Going to California,” which played at the end of the episode as two planes bearing most of the cast took flight from…
