Come on, somebody must remember

We’ve all had that feeling before, or experienced a disturbing lack of memory recall at the wrong time when a familiar tune floats out of a doorway or a bar jukebox speaker and not for the life of you can you remember the name of the artist or the song.

To your friends you might be a fountain of musical knowledge, a veritable encyclopaedia of band names, album dates or a tome of rock n’ roll history. But when your brain lets you down where are you then?

Shazam!

U.K. readers might remember a few years ago a new service was launched that didn’t arrive with too much fanfare but it’s usefulness and quirkiness quickly spread by word of mouth. This service was Shazam, a number you could text or simply call and place in the direction of the sound source and after a small-ish time listening to the song you hang up. Then 30 seconds later, hey presto an SMS came through with your song, title, artist name, date, album name. Practically everything you need to now. This service has now expanded to include the Blackberry and the iPhone with applications that let you use the speedier internet data services to recognise your music. So if you don’t live in the UK or US where Shazam is supported and you don’t have a cell phone – what are you supposed to do?

I’m a Tunatic

Ready to recognise

Well enter my recent discovery, a small freeware application for both the Mac and the Windows platform that sits open and listens to your songs through you microphone (not supplied!). Now whenever that temporary amnesia hits, you can be armed with a weapon to find out those missing song details at a click of a button.

Beauty In Simplicity

The most disarming aspect of this little piece of software is it’s tiny footprint and widget like simplicity. It doesn’t have any flash “web 2.0″ – esque functions like auto tagging the song it was listening to or any other fancy tagging features but it can be relied upon to find  a lot of songs in a pinch.

Functionality in the face of Obscurity

As a test of the comprehensiveness of the user maintained database of music I found an out CD that a friend from university sent to me about 4 years ago, which contained mostly songs from obscure or new and relatively unknown British indie bands. The 14 track listing only once through up an unidentified track, of which none of my friends with their knowledge of music have been able to identify either, so I will give it to them on that one.

Identify those musical nuggets, play your TV to it, it KNOWS.

This cool little app is definitely worth the download if you are consistently frustrated by your own memory or just simply don’t know the song. Small, convenient, unobtrusive and very very welcome.

Link to the developers web-page and download here