Listen very carefully…
Midomi Music Search is an app aimed at answering one question – “Oh, what’s this song called?”. It does this by ‘listening’ to a snippet of music (just a few seconds playing during an advert, say) and searching a comprehensive database of rhthym, tempo and and other musical ‘fingerprints’ to try and find a match.
Capturing a song is as simple as pointing your phone’s mic at the source (e.g. a speaker) and pressing the D-Pad. There is no set length of time the app needs to capture in order to work – just a few notes will be enough for some songs, while others will need a bit more – maybe a chorus or so.
Once the app decides it has enough or you stop the listening process because the track has finished, etc. Midomi will begin trawling through the database. Now, this database is pretty large – too large to fit on your phone, anyway. In order to complete the search, you need an internet connection. If you can’t get a signal or don’t want to allow the connection, he search will be automaticlaly saved as ‘pending’ and may be resumed at your leisure when you can get a connection.
The service proved pretty accurate on the track s I tried – music playing on adverts fared least well, usually due to voiceovers or the short length of the available clip. This is great for identifying music playing in clubs or on the telly, but if all you have is a vague memory of a track you can try singing or humming it into Midomi, which will still give it a good guess.
Weirdly, I found the singing/humming to be more accurate that using ‘real’ music. This may be down to my deliberately picking ‘challenging’ tracks from my MP3 collection in an attempt to fox the app, whereas when humming or singing I was forced to go with tunes I remembered, which were typically less obscure.
Assuming Midori can ID your song, it will let you listen to a sample of teh real thing and offer links to buy the track, watch the music video, etc. Searches and artist details can be bookmarked for later use and for those times when you have neither the actual music or any ability to hum it, you can just type in some search terms and Midori will see what it can do.
An excellent, surprisingly useful app that does once thing, but does it very well.
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App: Midomi Music Search & ID (Symbian)
Seller: Ovi Store
Price: £4.00
Version reviewed: 2.0.0
Requires: 3G, WiFi
Size: 0.703 MB
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Pocket Picks Score: 
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