SoundHound iPad App

SoundHound iPad App Review

SoundHound, a music recognition app from Melodis Corporation, lives up to its tag line – a revolution in music search.

SoundHound’s primary focus is the ability to record a sound clip from your surroundings through the iPad internal mic, and match the sound clip to its library to provide a song title. This is all done through a huge orange button labeled “tap here,” making the search process very easy and very quick.

Optimal conditions to clearly hear the songs are always better to help getting accurate results from the app.  Tests for this review were done with moderate background noise in a crowded café – songs could still be identified. SoundHound was not only able to identify a variety in song genres from US artists, but a few songs from Asia were also easily found by the app.

Other methods to identify songs include artist search, title search, and lyric search. Lyric search is not entirely accurate, as typing in as much as 10 consecutive words still did not return the result I was expecting.

Not only does SoundHound help you identify songs, it also recommends top hits and charts from various music categories. The iPad version of the app also integrates You Tube search, Twitter and geo-tagging your location each time you search for a song.

The defining factor that differentiates SoundHound from other music recognition apps is the ability to hum a song into the mic. Even with my poor singing skills, 15 seconds of humming resulted in a listing of Bruno Mars’ hit track Billionaire. It’s a really neat unique feature that helps identify those catchy radio tunes everyone secretly sings on the commute to work.

The free version of SoundHound allows you to tag up to 5 songs per month.