How many times have you heard a song being played and wanted to know the song name and artist so you can listen to it again but couldn’t? It has happened to most of us in the past but is no longer the case with the many audio recognition services out there. If you, too, are struggling with a similar musical issue, you might be interested in checking out our list of the best apps that can identify songs on your Android phone.
1. Google app
Price: Free
Maybe you’ve had this song stuck in your head for days, but no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t conjure up its name. Google comes to your rescue with a new tool which allows you to hum or sing a song into your phone and get the answer. You can do so by following these steps on your handset.
1. Open the Google app on your phone.
2. Tap the microphone icon in the search bar at the top of the screen.
3. Tap on the Search a song button.
4. Start humming, singing or whistling the song.
5. Your results should be displayed on the screen.
Make sure you’re in a quiet room when you attempt this, or else the results might not come through. For what it’s worth, you don’t have to be a master singer to attempt this. Just hum into your phone to the best of your abilities. If you can remember a couple of lyrics, all the better, as it will help the technology find what you’re looking for a lot faster. Once the matches are displayed, you can listen to the song(s) or get more information about them.
If, on the other hand, you’re using Google Assistant, simply say “Hey Google, what’s this song?” and then begin humming or singing into your phone.
The results won’t be long in showing up. This time, Google will display a card which also features the lyrics of the song.
Based on our testing, Google’s feature works quite well, so we invite you to give it a try yourself. By the way, you can use Google’s listening powers for a song that’s playing on the radio or anywhere else as well by following the same steps described above. Simply get your phone closer to the source, and Google will be able to identify it (most of the time).
2. Shazam
Price: Free
Shazam is is a very popular application on the Google Play Store for this purpose, and it works extremely well from our experience. Identifying music is a breeze with this app, and its solid integration with Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and more makes it easy for you to share new discoveries with friends.
Once the app finds the song for you, it’ll show information about the the song’s release date, album and artist. It’ll even show you the bio and other popular tracks from the artist just in case you want more.
Shazam also saves all the songs you’ve searched, so you can come back and check your library every time you’ve forgotten the name of a certain song and want to refresh your memory. The app has a Discover feature so that you can find new music. Users can access different charts, including global charts and a series of local ones featuring the most Shazamed song in the past week.
3. SoundHound
Price: Free / $5.99
SoundHound has been providing users with the option to identify songs through humming or singing for a long time before Google started offering the service. In order to do so, you need to tap the big orange button to have SoundHound start listening. The app works pretty great and pulls up the lyrics as well. For the best results, hum or sing for at least 10 seconds.
The same button works when a song is playing in the background and you want to identify it. SoundHound does its thing pretty quickly and identifies the tune with accurate results. The app also features a lyrics archive, where you can search to find lyrics for specific songs. Additionally, there’s a music discovery feature that displays artist recommendations based on genres.
4. BeatFind
Price: Free
BeatFind by Music Recognition is another alternative for identifying songs using your smartphone. It works quite fast, and its accuracy is pretty good. Once the app recognizes the song, users can press the first button in the upper-right corner and get the complete tracklist of the album which includes the tune they’ve searched for.
Moreover, music lovers can easily share their finds via most popular chat apps, as well as go on to listen to the song on Spotify, Deezer, or YouTube, or can simply search for it on the Web.
5. Genius
Price: Free
Genius is the more complex app in this list. While it does have a music identification option embedded, it’s not built solely around this function. Actually, the app’s main interface is dedicated to offering music fans access to news stories.
Apart from that, Genius has a pretty rich video section and a comprehensive artist database. As for the music identification feature, it works quite well, and in our testing we found it reacted quite quickly.
6. MusiXmatch
Price: Free / $3.99 and up
MusiXmatch is an app that focuses mostly on helping users get access to song lyrics. Even so, the app also includes a music identification tool. Finding the name of a song is as simple as using any of the apps included in the list above – just point your device towards the direction of the music.
When the app has recognized a song, it will also display the lyrics, which will run in real time on your screen. However, during our testing, the app had some problems identifying songs. Still, it’s floating lyrics feature is pretty handy, as it syncs with Spotify or your music library. Once this happens, whenever you’re on Spotify, a small window will start displaying the lyrics of the song you’re listening to.
In addition, MusiXmatch also includes a discovery tool which allows users to listen to new songs and artists as well as check out a series of top charts.
Now that you know how to identify songs using your Android phone, perhaps you would also be interested in upgrading your music playing app or learning how to improve the sound on your Android device.
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