Identify and Search for Songs or Music Using Lyrics and Sound Recognition

I have a lot of interest in music and what a disc jockey does. Few years back I bought 2 units of Pioneer CDJ-1000MK2 and a DJM-600 so I can play, scratch and mix musics but due to other more important commitment in my life, I can no longer afford to spend extra time in that area. That’s why you can find a Music category which I have no update for a very very long time. One of the most important thing in wanting to be a DJ is to know a lot of songs. It will be very tough for beginners because they don’t even know where to start and most of the time they can’t tell what song is being played in a club. Searching for the title or artist for an unknown song that you hear on the radio or at a party can be hard but thanks to computer, it’s not so difficult anymore.

The easiest way to search for the song is to remember the lyrics. Even a short sentence of lyrics will do. The best is to remember 2 or more sentence because there are times the lyrics are pretty similar. One of our forum member Stuge recorded a short audio clip and asked for help in identifying that song. It wasn’t tough because I can clearly hear 2 sentence of the song. With the help of Google, I got to know what is the title and artist of the song.

If there are no lyrics and only music like Electro, Techno and House genre, it is also possible to find the artist and title of the music.

Here’s how easy it is to search for a song with lyrics. The audio clip that Stuge provided has the lyrics “You got lucky babe, you got lucky, I found you”. All I needed to do is to type this in Google search box “you got lucky babe you got lucky i found you lyrics”. Take note of the “lyrics” that I added at the end of the search key.

Voila, the title of the song is You Got Lucky, sung by Tom Petty. If you can’t hear the lyrics but can remember the tune or beat, you can try more methods below.

1. Midomi

You can search for music by singing, humming or even whistling. You don’t need to download any software to use Midomi, all you need is a web browser with flash player, a mic and an internet connection. To use midomi to find your music, click the “Click and Sing or Hum” at the top of the page, then click Allow when you see the warning that www.midomi.com is requesting to access your camera and microphone. Start singing, humming or whistling. Once you’re done, click Stop and it’ll automatically upload the recorded audio from you to search for the song. During testing, I sang Wonderful Tonight by Eric Claptop, and Midomi is able to recognize it.

2. Tunatic

Tunatic claims to hear the song and you will get the artist’s name and the song’s title within seconds. Tunatic is the very first song search engine based on sound for your computer. All you need is a microphone and Internet access. Tunatic can’t identify music from classical genre and also song sung/hum by you. It has to be a recorded music. I’ve tested Tunatic to see if it can identify the song Close To You sung by The Carpenters but it couldn’t. Maybe you’ll have better luck with it…

Both Midomi and Tunatic relies on database to identify unknown songs, so it is not perfect. If all method fails, your only chance is to post the audio clip in DJ forums.