Nerdology • Going Mobile: SoundHound With every update to...

Going Mobile: SoundHound

With every update to SoundHound I am more and more impressed. What started as a free application called Midomi with limited functionality has grown into a vital part of my music discovery world. I downloaded Midomi in 2008 and it could identify a song that was playing or a song that you were singing. At the time that’s all it needed to do. iPhone apps were only a few months old and I downloaded it purely for the novelty.

Once the game of singing into the phone and trying to have it guess the song stopped being fun I put it away. Sometime during my non-use of the app it changed it’s name to SoundHound. Now when you searched for a song it also add related YouTube videos, the option to purchase the song directly in iTunes or on Amazon, a lyrics search, links to Pandora stations, artist tour dates and full media player functionality.

You can effectively use SoundHound instead of the iPod application. All of your songs and playlists are at your fingertips, as well as the previously stated videos and lyrics. It’s like an enhanced podcast for music you’re listening to.

It’s core functionality is still listening to music and telling you what it is. And it stores that history of tracks you searched (and if there was no internet connection it can store the audio data and look it up later) so you can further explore later. I use my list of tracks as a guideline for what music I should buy on eMusic.

There was an update on July 20th that somehow managed to make the application even better. They introduced Live Lyrics. Where you used to be able to search for lyrics you can now see the lyrics live scrolling n the application. It knows exactly where you are in the song and will scroll accordingly. It’s really impressive and since the chances are if you are looking up a song it’s because you don’t know the lyrics it’s also really helpful.

They also added Facebook, Twitter, Email and MMS integration to best message blast your friends about what song you are currently listening. Functionality I’ll probably never use, but who knows. If I suddenly find myself listening to a block of Zeppelin, I might text my Mom.

Soundhound has become a staple in my arsenal of mobile apps. What started as a free single use novelty product has grown into one of the best apps I have. On iOS it’s a Plus app so you get the iPhone and iPad versions for $6.99. On Android it’s $4.99 for their phone app. Worth grabbing, for sure.