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Shazam hits 250 million users, lets you tag TV shows
Shazam is one of those nearly magical apps that has been around since 2008. If you hear some music, you use Shazam to identify it by just holding it up and allowing the app to match it up with its database. The service makes money off partnerships and a sort of subscription services for its hardcore users. I've noticed the Shazam logo on a few ads here and there, and they've had some high profile partnerships like American Idol, where using the app will bring up song lists and iTunes links. Shazam now lets you tag any TV show on any channel, and will tell you who the actor is or what song is playing. There's even support for sports scores, although local programming won't register. Shazam will be monitoring stations and updating constantly, no small feat for an app which now claims 250 million users as its base. That's one of the most-downloaded apps of all time. Personally I like Soundhound (particularly the scrolling lyrics feature), but Shazam's TV utility is a fun twist.
Jelly Bean's Sound Search feature now available root-free on ICS
Did you know you can get a little squirt of Jelly Bean flavor in your Ice Cream Sandwich right now? It's nothing mega -- just a non-root APK for Google Sound Search, the new in-house rival to Shazam and SoundHound, courtesy of user "asdfzz" over at XDA. The widget, which is also known as "Google Ears," currently works in a similar way to third-party apps, analyzing a track via remote servers and bringing up the result within Google Play, but in the future -- according to Mobile Phones Fan -- it could achieve faster speeds and better integration with other Google services by running natively within the OS. Of course, if you're up for flashing a whole ROM, then Jelly Bean can already be had in its entirety.
Shazam Player is available for the iPad
Shazam updated its player app for the iPhone to version 1.5.1 and released it as a universal app with support for Retina Display on the new iPad. Shazam Player is an alternative to the iOS Music app that makes it easy for you to share and discover new music. The Shazam player scans your music library, matches tracks with LyricPlay and organizes your library by artists, albums, tracks and playlists. It has a lovely UI with a new player box that lets you see the songs playing in your queue and a beautiful full-screen LyricPlay view. LyricPlay is still underwhelming. It only picked up one song in my library of 200 songs, but I have an unusual taste in music. When it works, LyricPlay now supports AirPlay and can be viewed on your Apple TV. When it doesn't, there's an eye-catching visualization. The Shazam Player is available for free from the iOS App Store.
Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 1
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Part II of this article will be coming next week -- stay tuned! The rise of smartphones hasn't been kind to makers of devices such as digital cameras, digital music players and portable GPS devices. Handsets with a rich selection of apps have been increasingly cannibalizing sales of these products, leaving few ways for these once hot holiday gift items to compete. In some cases, though, they have enabled functionality that was once envisioned for standalone products that either failed in the market or never went much beyond a niche audience. Here are five examples of failed devices that never made much headway. The concepts behind them, though, ultimately found acceptance on smartphones.
American Idol gets Shazamed, Captain Marvel ashamed to be eliminated before the live finals
Shazam has a-ha-ha-ha-nounced that the re-he-ma-hay-ning episodes of vowel-adding warble-fest American Idol will be tied into its music-identifying app. During each of the shows, it'll offer up the set list, behind the scenes videos and let you buy both the live cover versions and original editions of classic songs -- usually hewn from a simpler, gentler time before Mariah Carey was seen as someone worth em-hem-hem-ulating. In addition viewers will be able to get photos of their favorite contestants, but we won't be interested unless there's a generous dose of Jeff Winger Ryan Seacrest tucked in there too.
Shazam 5.0 update identifies audio in a split second, helps tortoise hands become the hare
Fits of inspiration are usually inopportune -- like when you realized eight years too late that it might've been wise to invest in Google. The same goes for that panicked impulse that strikes somewhere between rocking out to the last dregs of a song as it spills out of the radio and the time it takes for you to locate your phone, unlock it and launch Shazam. Well, for those of you slow on the draw, the company's making its music identification service a whole lot quicker. Now, iPhone and iPod touch users can track down artist info from music or TV in a literal second, courtesy of a software refresh. It's all part of a 5.0 update, available now, for the outfit's trio of apps -- Free, Encore and (RED) -- that also adds a new UI, the ability to comment on tags via social networks, as well as additional language support for South American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Korean. So the next time you hear a track you swear was your jam in the mid-90's, you'll know in a heartbeat precisely which Dishwalla album to download and secretly cherish. Remember them? Official PR after the break.
Shazam 5.0 offers faster tagging and startup
When you absolutely, positively need to know the song that is playing on the background soundtrack at the restaurant or club, Shazam (free) is the go-to application. The app "listens" to music, queries a database, and responds with information including the song's title, artist, and sometimes even the lyrics. Shazam just got a lot better, with a bump to version 5.0 that should make every user of the app even happier. As you can see from the update screen at right, Shazam (I use the $5.99 Encore version) has improved tagging and recognition speeds dramatically. One feature I was personally happy to see was improved startup time -- when you were trying to get Shazam to catch a few bars at the end of a song, it was annoying to have it take so long to start up that you missed it. The app now launches much faster -- the company says it's over a second quicker, but it feels faster than that. If you like to tweet what you're listening to, you can now edit your tweets if you're using iOS 5. The synchronization of LyricPlay lyrics to the music is better; I found almost no lag between the music and lyrics, even over "4G". The update to version 5.0 is a freebie and should appear in your App Store list of updates today.
Shazam Player brings lyrics support and more to iOS
The iPhone's default Music app already has lyrics support built in, but you have to fetch the lyrics yourself; songs sold on the iTunes Store still don't include lyrics after all these years. Shazam, makers of the well-known app that will identify songs playing in your vicinity after sampling a few seconds of audio, has released a free music player app called Shazam Player for the iPhone and iPod touch that addresses this gap in a big way. When first launched, Shazam Player will scan your entire music library to find songs compatible with its LyricPlay feature. Depending on how big your library is, this could take awhile; my iPhone 4S has close to 5000 songs on it (though for some reason Shazam Player only scanned 1600 or so), and it took about 5 minutes for the app to finish scanning my library for the first time. Shazam's lyrics database doesn't appear to be especially comprehensive yet, or at least not for the kind of music I tend to listen to. Out of 4936 tracks, Shazam Player found only 374 compatible with LyricPlay. For songs that support it, LyricPlay is pretty cool and mildly reminiscent of the kinetic typography music videos I've seen on YouTube. Lyrics scroll or fly onto the screen perfectly in time with the music. There are a variety of fonts and animation styles in LyricPlay, with some of them easier to read than others -- one particular style displays the currently playing snippet of lyrics at the bottom of the screen with all other lyrics jammed above it, which isn't particularly readable. Fortunately Shazam Player also includes Lyrics sheet, a more standard text-based view of lyrics for when LyricPlay wears out its welcome. Shazam Player includes some other welcome features like links to YouTube videos of the currently selected song and tour dates for the band. Since it's integrated with your music library, you have full access to every song, artist, and playlist on your device. However, the app doesn't appear to support nested playlist folders, instead presenting all playlists in the same view; if you're like me and have many playlists, Shazam Player's playlist view could seem a bit disorganized. Shazam Player has a nice UI, and the price is right -- since it's free, there's no reason not to check it out. But while LyricPlay and the other features are novel features, I'll most likely stick with the standard Music app on my iPhone; Shazam Player seems to lag and choke a bit on a music library as large as mine. That having been said, I strongly hope that Shazam is working on a version of Shazam Player for the iPad. While I don't feel that Shazam Player is going to replace the Music app on my iPhone in daily usage, the Music app on the iPad is so terrible that something like Shazam Player would be a most welcome alternative.
Shazam launches new Player app, lets you get to know your jams better
Shazam today released its first fully new app since the launch of the familiar self-titled music tagging app. The new, simply-named Shazam Player offers up streaming lyrics, YouTube videos, concert dates and lets you make playlists on the go. You can also share your favorites via Facebook and Twitter, to properly avoid becoming a musical shut-in. Press release and video after the break.
Gracenote Entourage: the ACR TV platform has a name!
Remember Gracenote's plans for an Automatic Content Recognition system for TV? (think: Shazam to help you work out which The Mentalist episode is on). Now it's got a name: Gracenote Entourage. It'll run on smartphones and tablets to identify movies, TV shows and music just from the audio clip. It'll then show you related programming, actor bios and, erm, relevant advertising (but hey, they've gotta make money somehow, yeah?). It'll run on mobile devices and smart TVs, although would that really be easier than pressing the "TV Guide" button on your remote? We'll leave that for you to judge.
Android Market's big sale hits Day 8, sense of deja vu increases
Is the Android Market running out of apps to offer its sales-hungry users? Several of today's downloads have already seen their prices snipped at some point last week -- at least you now have a second chance to grab them. To ameliorate the disappointment of the slightly samey selection, the little green one's pushed the boat out to 12 different apps. Instant Heart Rate Pro could be worth a ten cent investment, if only for some medical showboating. But is it too much to ask for a cut-price Shadowgun before the end? C'mon Google, give us an early Christmas miracle.
Android Market's ten-cent promo moves into day 4 with Need for Speed Shift, Shazam Encore and eight more
The Android Market ten-cent promo has moved into Day 4, once again offering up a fresh daily set of apps to celebrate the virtual venue's ten billionth download. As of this writing, yesterday's apps are still on sale (and still featured on the Market's main promo page), but today's sale includes titles like Need for Speed Shift, Shazam Encore, Farm Frenzy, Sentinel 3 and Jelly Defense. Rounding out the lineup: Spirit HD, Toddler Spanish, Game Dev Story, Baseball Superstars 2011 and My Beach HD. Amazon doesn't appear to be matching the sale price this time around (yet), so if any of these titles are striking a chord, you'll need to go through the Market itself to check 'em out. Note: It appears that at the time of this writing most if not all paid apps are experiencing technical difficulties when downloading -- on either the online Market or the phone -- so if you're having trouble getting one of the ten cent apps, we recommend taking a brief hiatus and coming back to try again a little bit later. Update: The promo page has been updated and it looks like all of the apps are downloading just fine now. Head to the source link to get started. Update 2: So it seems that Google Wallet is having issues staying live today, so it's quite possible that you'll continue to have issues purchasing your apps until the service is fully restored. Update 3: If you ran into issues with Google Wallet today, you may be in for some freebies: Android Police is reporting that users who had their orders cancelled are being awarded free apps. Hit their link below for details.
RIM offers free apps to make up for that whole BlackBerry outage thing
RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has already apologized for last week's widespread BlackBerry outage, but apparently, that wasn't enough. Today, the manufacturer announced that it's offering customers a full slate of "premium apps" for free, in the hopes of earning back some of the goodwill it lost following that mysterious blackout. In a statement, the company said the gesture is "an expression of appreciation" for the patience that many BlackBerry users demonstrated during the incident, with Lazaridis adding that his company remains "committed to providing the high standard of reliability" that consumers have come to expect. For now, the company's offering a total of 12 apps (collectively valued at around $100), including SIMS 3, iSpeech Translator Pro and Shazam Encore among others, though more will be added at a later date. The offer kicks off on Wednesday and will last for a month, so head past the break to see which goodies are up for grabs.
Shazam violates Developer Agreement, blames Jeff Rock
Jeff Rock happened to notice a push notification on his iPhone after installing Shazam. He checked it and it turned out to be an advertisement that had popped up. Since it didn't seem like expected behavior (push notification of an advert?), Jeff tweeted the Shazam folks to ask about it. Instead of a) Apologizing and trying to sort it out, b) Taking him seriously and helping troubleshoot, or c) Ignoring him entirely, they chose d) Tell Jeff it was clearly his fault. Not so fast there, Shazam...missing the point he was trying to make, they told him that he must have turned notification on himself and needed to turn them off. Let me just point out that his complaint was not that he received A notification, it was that he received an AD as a notification. Telling them so got him the reply that he had clearly opted-in to notification at some point. Jeff, trying to be more clear, quoted back chapter and verse from the iOS Program Standard Agreement that this particular "feature" was violating. This got a different response at least; now they say they'll "look into it". For Jeff in particular, I can see how this would be extra frustrating. He's a developer himself, co-founder of Mobelux who built the app that is now the official iOS Tumblr client. It seems the number of "Can you believe I got rejected for that!?" incidents is in decline, but with the number of apps that still get rejected for small reasons, it is odd this particular violation happened to make it through the approval process.
Shazam offers unlimited free tagging to iPhone app
Users of Shazam, the popular iOS app that allows people to discover what song is playing on the radio, television, or almost anywhere, will be happy to hear that Shazam is offering unlimited free tagging in its iPhone app. Shazam allows users to simply hold up their iPhone while a song is playing, which the app will then identify, or tag. Previously, Shazam users got five free song tags a month and if you wanted more you had to pay for the Shazam Encore service. Now however, iPhone users get unlimited free song tagging. Shazam is offsetting their Encore revenue by partnering with Capital "What's in your wallet?" One. So expect plenty of ads. But hey, I'd rather be able to identify any song I hear at any time and see come credit card ads rather than having to shell out for a subscription to tag music. Shazam is a free download in the App Store.
Shazam Encore updated with lyrics, how about iTunes?
Shazam has released another update for its paid Encore app, this one adding full lyrics of over 25,000 songs on the service from provider LyricPlay. It lets you stream the lyrics in real-time as the song plays, so you can sing (or even just read) along. It's not exactly a reason to shell out for the US$5.99 app -- I'm still using the free version to identify music that I listen to, and it works just fine for that purpose. But it's a nice addition to the Encore functionality, and it's good to see that someone has worked out how to make song lyrics available to listeners in a simple and easy way. In fact, this makes us wonder just where iTunes is on this issue. We've seen rumors for a long time that iTunes has been trying to add a lyrics feature (and there are plenty of ways to just do it yourself if you'd like to do that). But especially now that Apple has figured out something as complicated as iTunes Match, surely lyrics shouldn't be that hard to do, right? Unfortunately, the RIAA is still against it, and they've actually shut down any relatively easy solutions for quickly bringing lyrics into iTunes. It's a real shame -- especially for any music purchased from the iTunes Store (and because of the way iTunes Match works, all of your music will probably come from the App Store soon), we should really have access to the lyrics as the songs play.
Shazam adds LyricPlay, lets you act like you knew the words to that song all along
Remember the song that was playing at the bar last night that you just had to know the name of? You busted out the iPhone and fired up Shazam to tag that sucker, and now that you've got it in your collection, so you can forever relive that magical first time you heard it. But whatever happened to immediate gratification? And since when was it possible to enjoy a song without fumbling through the lyrics? This morning's upgrade to the popular music tagging app has your back -- the premium versions of the service have added the LyricPlay feature, which syncs to the song you're listening to, displaying its lyrics as it plays. The feature is currently available on the $6 Shazam Encore and (Shazam) Red apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. It works with 25,000 plus songs and growing, and is set to become the bane of bartenders around the world by the middle of next week.
How to go music hunting for Shazam and Pandora
The New York Times has an interesting writeup of a growing new trade built around services commonly used as smartphone apps: music-tracking, or music-identifying services. You've probably played with Pandora or Shazam on your iPhone already, and the article profiles just how all of that music gets tracked down and identified for your listening pleasure. A surprising amount of it is still done simply by human hands. While everything is still fed into the system, obviously (computers do have to know what the music is and what it sounds like), humans do a lot of the actual tracking down, both finding new tracks to index and implement, and listening in to describe to the computers how it sounds. The other side of it is interesting, too -- Shazam's employees will keep an eye on what's showing up on television or in movies, and make sure that the database can identify any songs popping up and being tagged a lot. It's really wild. Of course I know that there are networks of people and computers behind these apps tI only use for a moment every day, but they're such a small part of my life that I tend to forget just how much work goes into them. [via Engadget]
The thrilling life of a Shazam music hunter
If you're a vinyl aficionado, if you frequent college radio, if you've usually lost interest in the Next Big Thing long before they finally get a proper record deal, get ready to meet your dream job. It's held by a few select people around the world, including Charles Slomovitz. Charles works for Shazam, the music identification service, and his gig is basically to hunt down what's new and fresh. Hot Rhianna remix hitting the clubs? He's on it. The Fleet Foxes album that's on the way? He'll be there, faster than a speed picker on Red Bull. The service is popular because it can identify what's new while it's still new, and it's largely those like Charles searching the various musical niches scattered around the country that keep it fresh. The New York Times profile of his career on the other end of the source link is worth a read, and might just be something you want to talk to your guidance counselor about. [Image credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times]
Shazam and Spotify team up on iOS and Android apps
In yet another sign that Spotify has gone mainstream the company has just announced a partnership with Shazam -- the ubiquitous mobile music identification service. Under the deal, Shazamers will now be greeted with a "Play in Spotify" feature for all music discovered. The feature will be fully integrated in Shazam's free app "soon" and is available now for the premium apps on Android and iOS wherever Spotify is available, namely, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.
