Discover which song is playing

After tagging a song, you're able to purchase it, add it to your favorites, read the lyrics, or see what album the song came from. Interestingly, SoundHound also supports singing or humming music to identify it. Since other apps don't do this, we won't test this feature here. SoundHound is supported by ads and offers an upgrade to SoundHound Infinite if you want to remove them. Our final song identifier app, Musixmatch, was once paired up with Spotify to provide lyrics.

While the two are no longer connected, Musixmatch is another app that recognizes songs, with a heavy focus on lyrics. On the Home tab, you can browse the latest releases and top charts. On the Music tab, you can connect your Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music account to listen along to tracks in your library with their lyrics.

Using the Contribute tab, you can help other users by adding lyrics for songs that don't have any yet, syncing lyrics to the music, or even translating lyrics to another language. The music identification portion, which is what we'll test here, is under the Identify tab and works just like Shazam and SoundHound. You can access past songs using the History link at the top-right.

Once you tag a song, the lyrics will immediately start playing. As a cool benefit, you can show the lyrics translated into another language right below the original words. This is a clever way to practice when learning a language. Because of the app's nature, it won't work when used offline, so you can't save tagged music for later like Shazam does. Due to its unique lyrics angle, Musixmatch is worth keeping around even if you normally use Shazam or SoundHound. Of course, we'll only compare the app's ability to correctly identify songs in this battle.

If you're picking an app based on looks and features alone, it's not a clear-cut decision. Shazam is clean and doesn't feature any ads, while SoundHound has the unique option to hum or sing. Meanwhile, Musixmatch also has a fresh, modern look with the best lyrical options of the three.

We think Shazam is a great overall choice, but give SoundHound a try to see if it's better for your needs. As mentioned, Musixmatch makes a great sidekick to either of them due to its excellent lyric support. While there are other apps like Shazam on Google Play and the App Store, these are the three best choices. There's little point in testing them when they're not in active development. Now it's time to move onto the fun part: pitting these song recognition apps against each other.

This showdown consists of three rounds, each containing two songs. Apart from that, what I love the most about Shazam is that you can even recognize songs that are playing on your smartphone. This can be especially useful while browsing Instagram where you discover so many cool background music and songs. Lastly, if you have a low-powered device then go with Shazam Lite which is pretty lightweight and brings the same music recognition algorithm.

SoundHound SoundHound is another great song identifier app that works like a charm. One area where SoundHound is much better than Shazam is that you can even hum tunes to find a song. Simply launch SoundHound, and hum the tune to it. Apart from that, SoundHound is as fast as Shazam is, when it comes to identifying songs, and is an awesome app to identify music.

It also provides lyrics for you to sing along. Not to mention, it keeps all your song discoveries in a clean UI.

Musixmatch Lyrics is an app that you can use to quickly identify music that is playing around you with in-line lyrics. The app is not just a music recognition app, but also a music player with lyrics support. Musixmatch then tries to recognize the music that is playing, and find a song that matches the audio fingerprint.

Other than that, it also offers translations of music lyrics to many global and regional languages. I would say, Musixmatch is a feature-packed app to identify songs and you must give it a shot.

Genius Genius is our final app to identify music on this list. Simply open the app and tap on the music recognition button located at the bottom-right corner. In my testing, it worked all the time, but it was a bit slower in comparison to other apps.

Besides that, the app shows a list of songs that are the most identified songs on Genius. You can tap on any of these songs, to see their lyrics, and to play them, if you want. The app also gives you the option to download the lyrics or share the song with someone else. Other than that, you can tap on the hamburger menu, and tap on identify songs to figure out what song is playing. To sum up, if you want a song recognition app with lyrics support then Genius is a decent pick.

Midomi Midomi is a song detector website built by SoundHound that you can use to identify music simply by playing music on your computer. It can even recognize humming or whistling the tune into your laptop mic. Simply launch the Midomi website, and hum the tune; the website will recognize the music and name that song. Further, you can play the song on Spotify or Apple Music as well. Visit Website If you have a Google Home smart speaker, and you hear a song nearby that you like e.

The Amazon Echo can also help. To get your Echo to identify a song for you, simply say Turn on ID at any time, and it will announce the title and artist of each song before it plays.

It only tells you the name of the station, rather than the song being played. You can also buy a smart speaker on eBay, but before you do, make sure you subscribe to Coupert and install their browser extension. There you have it — six easy ways to help you identify the name of a song. Hopefully this will help make your music listening experience better! Feel free to share your ideas, suggestions and questions with us in the comment section below.

Thanks for reading! Enya is a technical writer and one of the main contributors to the Driver Easy knowledgebase. Partly because she enjoys the tech itself, and partly because she derives great satisfaction from helping people eliminate the technological headaches that plague their day-to-day lives. To install Driver Easy Click. Identify Songs Quickly! Information Seller Shazam Entertainment Limited.

Size Category Music. Compatibility iPhone Requires iOS Price Free. Developer Website App Support. Family Sharing With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app. Featured In. Get More Out of Shazam. Can You Beat Shazam? Play with the hit game show to win cash prizes.

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