New Phone Service Promises to ID Songs

Coolnat2004 writes "Ever get a song stuck in your head, but you missed the DJ announcement of the song name? That's the idea powering a new cell phone-based service called 411-SONG. Just call 866-411-SONG, and hold your phone up to the speaker. 15 seconds later the call ends and the information on your song is displayed on your phone's screen. This comes at a price, though. 99 cents for your first 5 songs, and then 99 cents a song after that. However, nbc4.com reports that a subscription model may be coming soon. Wouldn't this technology be great for fixing up all those ID3 tags?"

Comments

Well

[pHatidic]

Wouldn't this technology be great for fixing up all those ID3 tags?

Well with google you can already do this for free. However, the catch is that you need good enough pitch to know what the notes are. But if you can get them (or close enough), then you can type them in to get the song.

Re:Been there, done that ....

[yakhan451]

Am I the only one that doesn't have good luck with MusicBrainz? I've tried it many times and it rarely gets it right. Maybe it only works with really common stuff, but my tastes aren't too off the wall.

I've seen people asking for bulk retagging using MusicBrainz for my favorite music player, but boyhowdy, if I sent my collection through it, I'd never be able to find anything again. =]

In short... if this service is anything like MusicBrainz I hope they offer refunds.

Re:Been there, done that ....

[Nasarius]

No. MusicBrainz uses fingerprinting of the waveform (a kind of one-way hash, so it doesn't store the actual music). I find the track length on ripped songs usually varies by a few seconds anyway, so the exact length is really only useful in identifying the original CDs, which MusicBrainz can also do.

In my experience, it works fairly well and only gets confused when the same recording has been released on multiple albums ("best of", remasters, etc).

Re:a couple of things....

[pherthyl]

It's not about what we need. It's about what people will buy.
If the bottom line is that you don't need it, then don't use it. I can never understand people complaining about technology they think is useless. Exactly what impact does it have on your life if they make a microwave with 100 power levels?

I'll tell you, NONE. But for the dude around the corner, it's what he's been looking for, and more importantly, what he'll shell out a couple bills for.

Concerning the song identification, I think it's pretty neat. My cell phone carrier, Fido, has had this for quite some time (#DJ) and it works impressively well. Musicbrainz is similar for tagging MP3s, but I haven't had much success with it. It quite often misidentifies songs. What I really want is some sort of program that you could run that performs the analysis on whatever is being put out on the soundcard and then tries to guess the song title from that. Now that would be cool for figuring out the title of songs streamed from the internet, or in movies.

Well....

[servoled]

I just tried it with a song which I have been trying to figure out off and on for awhile. 411-song failed on two attempts, which I suppose isn't too suprising. On the bright side they claim that I won't be charged since they didn't identify the song.

Moodlogic as suggested by other people seems to want me to identify the artist and song title before it will tell me the artist and song title which seems about as worthless as anything.

If anyone wants to take a crack at it, it is the second song played in this rm file: Glen Jones Radio Programme April 3, 2005

Can I sing it too ?

[thrill12]

Only then would it be of interest to me.

I must warn though: I am not a very good singer...