Finding music by sound is an important task for many people. There are situations in life when, for example, a recording made on a tape many years ago cannot be recognized, that is, it is impossible to independently determine the group or singer who performs the work, the name of the song, the year of recording, and so on.
This article will discuss several programs that help solve this problem.
Most popular service
Many users of smartphones with the Android operating system can see on their desktop a blue icon with white capital letter S.
This icon indicates the Shazam application, which is a program for finding music by sound. It is preinstalled in many models of smartphones, and according to some publications it is among the ten best and most popular applications in the world.
Where to begin?
The interface of this program is extremely simple. Through the microphone, searching for music by sound is carried out immediately after pressing the button, which has a circular shape and is located in the middle of the screen. After this action is performed, the key with the letter S turns into a spinning multiplied element.
Users usually have to wait a short time. Within a few seconds, usually 2-5, the gadget owner sees the search result on the display. In this application, in addition to the results traditional for such services in the form of an artist’s name, track name, year of recording, album name, and so on, a link to a clip on the YouTube service is usually also provided. Sometimes here you can read the biography of the artist, another program offers to buy this musical material through any site. To get the result in the very near future, of course, you need an Internet connection via Wi-Fi or through a mobile provider.
And if there is no connection?
Just a couple of years ago, this circumstance was considered an insurmountable obstacle to search for music by sound. However, the developers of this application today have already figured out how to make it easier for their customers to receive services for recognizing compositions.
So, at the moment, in this program for searching for sound by music for Android and other operating systems, it is possible to find information about the track of interest even if the mobile Internet is inactive at the time the song is played. How does this happen? To understand this, you must first find out how the process of material identification is carried out.
Secret
So, the search for music by sound through this application is as follows.
When a user of a mobile device hears a track that interests him and wants to find out who is playing it, he clicks on the icon of this program, and after that there is no choice but to do the same with the round button in the middle of the screen, since there are no others controls at this stage is not provided. Next is the recognition process.
The program captures the musical composition in the form of an audio signal, but not as an audio recording, as a voice recorder or other device does, but converts it into a spectrogram, that is, into a special graph that encodes the volume of sounds using colors, the duration as the length of each individual mark , and the oscillation frequency is depicted as a height.
But this process is invisible to the user of the program, all that he can observe is the animation of the round frame of the Shazam key and almost immediately output the result.
In fact, the spectrogram is compared with the same graphs that are in the virtual archive of the program for finding music by Shazam sound. As soon as the application finds a suitable option, that is, a drawing similar to the one just made, it immediately gives the result in the form of track information.
If the song is not found?
In this case, the application notifies the user that such a song or instrumental piece is not in his database.
If the Internet is disconnected, then the recoding of the sound signal to the spectrogram occurs immediately, and its comparison with the virtual archive is carried out only after connecting to the Network.
If you register in the program, then some additional functions become available, the most useful of which is a list of previously viewed and recognized songs. This may be necessary, for example, if a person heard the music he liked at work when he did not have enough free time to download a favorite song.
He will be able to do this when he opens the Shazam program at his leisure. The base of this wonderful application contains several million compositions of various genres. Users will be pleasantly surprised that this offer to search for music by sound is able to recognize Russian-language works.
Shazam, open up!
This app for finding music by sound was developed by an English company founded by two students. It is estimated that at the moment the number of its users is more than 200 million people worldwide. In the Russian language, even the concept of "shazamit" has appeared, albeit not yet fixed in the official dictionaries.
This, no doubt, indicates the growing popularity of this program.
And another fact that speaks of great prospects in the development of this proposal is that at the end of last year, Shazam and all the rights to it were bought by the American company Apple, widely known for its mobile and other devices.
British rivals
However, American developers of computer applications are not far behind their colleagues from the UK. They also invented their own application, searching for music by sound on a computer or on mobile devices.
Such a program was created by Soundhound and has the same name. It can be downloaded absolutely for free, but the free version is replete with advertising. For those who do not want to spend time installing any programs on their devices, it is possible to recognize the composition directly on the company's website.
Sing a little light, don't be ashamed
A distinctive feature of this service is that it is possible not only to recognize the songs that are in the audio recordings and sounding during identification, but also to sing a fragment from a remembered melody, which, most likely, will be determined. The likelihood that the composition will be recognized and detailed information will appear before the user on the screen of a stationary computer, tablet, or smartphone is approximately 95%. But the result is not displayed in the form of the name of a single song, but as a list of several options, the first of which is the most likely result. And then on the principle of decrease.
It is worth saying only that in order to use this function, a person must have a sufficiently well-developed musical ear and accurate intonation in order to be able to reproduce the passage well enough. Otherwise, the program will still offer a specific list of several tracks, but most likely, all of them will not be what you are looking for.
Google
There are several more options for finding music by sound on your computer. One of them is a service from an American popular search engine. Searching for music by sound in Google is slightly inferior in accuracy to the applications described above.
However, it is not a program as such. Google only offers to add to the desktop an icon-link to the corresponding online service.
Our answer to the west
All programs for finding music by sound for Android operate on a similar principle, namely, using the spectrogram compilation method.
In Russia, too, recently there is a service for music lovers.
It is called Audiotag. info is the development of programmers working in the staff of the electronic magazine websound.ru.
A feature of this service for recognizing music is that there is no way to determine the sounding composition through a microphone online. However, the site helps to find information about the track of interest if you upload the recording to the server.
Music lovers will be pleasantly surprised that this site is designed specifically for music lovers from our country. In addition to Western compositions, he also recognizes well the works performed by domestic artists, including pop music from the Soviet period.
Conclusion
This article examined services for finding music by sound. Some of them can only be used on mobile devices, and some are designed for smartphones. All these developments do their job perfectly.
The choice of each specific user depends only on the conditions for using the services: the device with which it deals and what type of service the remote one prefers - an application or an online version.