By Mohammad Yousef | December, 2005
Today, I was delighted to stumble upon this clever little app called Tunatic. It’s a free program or kind of a search-engine to identify songs and it’s available for Windows 2k/XP and Mac OS X.
Tunatic listens to audio input (through microphone) and sends it back to the Tunatic server for analysis. After the tune has been looked up, it displays the matching song title and artist’s name.
I’ve always wanted something like this, so I liked the idea and downloaded Tunatic to run some tests.
Launching Tunatic for the first time, I was glad to see its simple no-frills interface. Then I randomly selected a few songs to be played and placed the microphone close to the speakers. The immediate results were very impressive; it recognized all tracks in seconds! To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I played about 30 other songs from various artists and it only missed a couple of them. Some of them also needed to be played twice, but that could be my worn-out microphone’s fault. Next, I tested some 64kbps files from my cell phone (Sony Ericsson K750i) and the results were equally remarkable. Another thing that impressed me is its accuracy in distinguishing between different versions of the same song.
Based on my results, their database seems to be quite vast and growing. The main drawback is for classical music lovers because for some reason it can’t identify this genre. But altogether, Tunatic is great tool and in my opinion it’s a must-have if you enjoy listening to music.
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