Sound Hound - Android AND iPhone app

Ok, so I started telling you about Sound Hound, one of my favorite apps on my Android phone.  It's a song recognition app that proves itself very awesome useful time and time again. Just to get you up to speed, when I had my Blackberry Curve, I actually purchased the Shazam app for my phone.  I would find myself listening to the radio or out somewhere listening to a song and want to know who sang it or what was the name of the song.  At times I knew the song from back in the day but couldn't place a group with the song.  See, I wasn't suppose to listen to "mainstream" radio when I was growing up so I really have no idea how I know some of these songs as I was such an obedient child and only listened to what my parents told me to listen to. And now you can stop laughing at the thought of my being an obedient child all of my life :-)

Anywho, when I switched back over to an Android phone from my Blackberry, I found the Shazam app in the Android Market and immediately downloaded it. (Sidenote:  before I download an app to my phone I usually read the user reviews to see what people say about it before I add it to my phone).So when I downloaded Shazam, I read in the reviews that someone mentioned something about an app called Sound Hound and how it was so much better than Shazam.  Blasphemy! How could anyone say that about my beloved Shazam?! So I decided to sneak over and check out the Sound Hound app without Shazam finding out about my disloyalty.  Upon reading the reviews for Sound Hound I decided to give it a try just to compare.  Um, can I say that I'm sorry Shazam but you've been out apped!  Just the initial view of the app on my phone was more appealing than Shazam.  Then when I put it to use by having it recognize a song I was sold!

One of the first things I noticed is that when it recognizes the song, it also provides the lyrics!  Woo hoo!!  I know that may not mean much to some of you, but for some reason I thought that was so cool.  Another thing that Sound Hound does that Shazam doesn't is it recognizes your own humming or singing of a song.  Yes, it works.  I put on my inner Chris Tomlin and sang beautifully completely out of tune the song "Jesus Messiah" and it recognized it!  Granted the phone was laughing at me while it coughed out various suggestions for songs, but the first one it listed was the song I "sang". How cool?!

As hoped, you are also able to look up an artist and see what songs they sing or you can type in a song title to look up information about the song.  I looked up Dave Barnes. Over on the left side of this post is a screen capture image from my phone of what the page looked up after typing in Dave Barnes.  Once the song list was generated I clicked on one that I wanted to look up.  If you notice there are little arrows on the album art of the individual songs.  If you see a little arrow you will be able to listen to a little clip of the song which I think is a cool feature.

There is just so much that Sound Hound has to offer and I could gush on and on about it but it's usually best to try it out yourself. It's a fun app to have on your phone.