@tech

Today I wanted to figure out the name and artist of a music snippet I had that was about 10-11 seconds long.  Being an iPhone user I could turn to SoundHound, except I opted to uninstall it as I didn’t use it much and it took up a lot of space on my iPhone and it didn’t seem to help me find things very often.  SoundHound now offers an app for the Mac but I’m not running the latest OS so that wasn’t an option to test.  Now what?

There is the web site AudioTag that’s in beta right now.  I tried it first but was unsuccessful.  Sadly I haven’t had any success with this site yet after maybe 6 attempts, but I haven’t given up that one day it will find a song for me.

So I did a quick search and discovered an app I had used in the past on a different Mac and forgotten about, Tunatic.  After a quick download I ran the app.  Tunatic uses your Mac’s mic to listen to what you’re playing and then searches for the song.  So get your audio snippet handy, crank up the sound, start playing the snippet and click on Tunatic.  With the song in question I was searching for, Tunatic found it after only a few seconds of playing!  Impressive!  In fact it seems to work faster than SoundHound on my iPhone ever did.

I attempted another song search, this one a much more obscure and equally short snippet that no one has been able to figure out for months.  Unfortunately Tunatic couldn’t figure this one out either.  Oh well, maybe one day this song will be in the database they use and we’ll find out.  As I’ve said, I have used this app previously with success then as well.  It’s a great app, is small and fast, and is freeware.  There’s also a Windows version.  Check it out!