How to identify a music song not by lyrics, but by sound

Posted on January 22, 2008 at 6:39 am

Ever heard of a song identifier or a music identification software? Well usually when I hear a song and want to know the singer or the name of the song, I end up going to relying on a music search engine where I can find a song by it’s lyrics. I had written a few months back about how to find the name or title of a song by lyrics, if you know them.

But there’s also another cool way you can identify a song and that’s by having a piece of software listen to it, identify it within a few seconds and then tell you what it is!

Tunatic is a freeware application for Windows and Mac OS X that will listen to a song and transmit the song’s features to the Tunatic servers to search for a matching song.

To run Tunatic on your computer, you’ll need the following:

A PC running Windows 2000, XP or better
or A macintosh running Mac OS X v10.2 or better
Internet access
A microphone plugged into your computer. Alternatively, you can plug your sound source directly to your computer.

If you don’t have a mic, you might still be able to get it to work by plugging in your sound source (i.e. radio, etc) directly into your computer’s microphone jack. You’ll have to get an inexpensive audio cable for this setup.

You can also identify songs that are being streamed to your computer (from an Internet radio station, etc) without using a microphone. Most PC sound cards allow you to select as input “What You Hear”, also named “Stereo Mix” or “Mixed Output”. You can configure this by right-clicking on Tunatic’s window, selecting Preferences, and then clicking on the Configure button. For Mac’s, you can use a software such as SoundFlower or Jack OS X to do the same thing.

So can Tunatic identify any type of music? It can identify music from any genre except for classical. Also, Tunatic can only identify songs that are in it’s database, which is kept-up-to-date by a community of Tunatic users using a program called Tunalyzer. If someone is not showing up, you can add it to the Tunalyzer database easily.

Tunatic can only identify recorded songs, so you can’t record yourself singing a Britney Spears song and expect Tunatic to figure that out!

If you get an error message saying the server is unreachable, you need to make sure ports 5747 and 5748 are open on your firewall. Also, Tunatic will not work through a proxy server. If you get a message saying “Signal too weak” that means the music is not loud enough.

Tunatic seems like a pretty cool piece of software and if you listen to a lot of Internet radio stations, it may be worth trying so you can identify which song you are listening too. Enjoy!

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» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

Comments

12 Responses to “How to identify a music song not by lyrics, but by sound”

ZaZu said on : February 12th, 2009 at 5:07 pm

THANK YOU !!!THANK YOU !!!THANK YOU !!!THANK YOU !!!

Errm, a bit over excited, thanks

I wanted to know what is the name of this song for literary more than a year, I keep forgetting to ask people around.

Safri Duo – PlaYed a Live (the Bong Song)

Ahhhh

Thanks, works like a charm

Thank you very much !!!!

—Who ever says that google searching is useless is IGNORANT

wonderful article

am said on : February 20th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

Can it ID songs in diminished quality, ie songs on youtube or songs in the background of a TV show?

jay said on : March 17th, 2009 at 10:18 am

does this software identify non-english songs? i found a hindi song on youtube and i’d like to identify it.

Someone said on : April 10th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Wow, it works great! I was trying to identify an instrumental song (no lyrics) and it only took a couple of seconds. The song was Cliffs of Dover by Eric Johnson. Thanks!!

iugafuygyauhv said on : June 18th, 2009 at 4:16 pm

Amazing!!!! Now I can identify any song! Thank You.

Jesuo said on : July 8th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

Unbelievably fast, great and easy !
Fantastic software with truly amazing satisfying results !
Thumbs up !!!

cyberdeath said on : August 3rd, 2009 at 6:48 pm

damn!!! is there any other way to identify songs… or japanese version of tunatic!!! i want to identify one japanese track that i found on youtube and it tunatic gives me shit… also i tried one more track (this time english) and all the same “cant found anything” man… im tired!!! someone knows something about any other progs?

robert said on : August 25th, 2009 at 4:39 pm

WHAT A HEAP OF RUBBISH HONISTLY.. IVE TRIED FAMOUS SONGS WITCH I ALREADY KNOW AND SONGS I DONT KNOW.. AND EVERYTIME WITHOUT FAIL IT SAYS “SONG NOT FOUND” HEAP OF CRAP!!

Tester said on : October 1st, 2009 at 12:51 am

The program DOES work, but only for major songs that have a label and are popular, it identified MOST of the songs but not some of the newer electronic music

jaivik said on : October 6th, 2009 at 4:34 am

i am so happy….it works…thanks..

dickhead said on : October 24th, 2009 at 4:02 am

Doesn’t work for House/Electro songs.

J L van Os said on : November 11th, 2009 at 3:31 am

You can play some ten of the first notes of a song you want to identify on the virtual keyboard of the MelodyCatcher http://www.melodycatcher.com/ and when availabe in the database you will find a MIDI audio file of that song, its title and its source on the Internet.