Free Unlimited Music Identification (Shazam for Android)

There are several Music Tagging applications available for the Android platform- most notably Shazam and SoundHound. My favourite of these applications it Shazam mainly because of its design rather than function. It does fall behind SoundHound in the sense that it cannot identify songs by recording a person humming it etc. SoundHound has this feature and more- check it out for a more functional, but less attractive application.

Shazam has recently been updated. The latest version is reported to allow users to tag an unlimited amount of songs with the free application. This service used to cost around five British Pounds so it just shows how much money Shazam must be making through other aspects of their business. There are still ads in the free application- one source of revenue for Shazam- but these are not at all distracting in such an application. The ads are surprisingly interactive- they can be clicked to be expanded. Such a simple thing as having good ads can make an application a lot nicer to use.

Shazam is laid out in tabs. These are Tagging, My Tags, Chart and Friends. The Tagging tab is where you can identify music with one click. Just click the 'S' and the application will record the playing music and bring up all available information about it.

The My Tags tab displays all information previously retrieved by the application- all previous tags are displayed.

The most tagged songs appear in the Chart tab. This shows all popular tags from all Shazam users. Unfortunately it displays the most tagged songs which means it displays the most unrecognised songs. I am not so sure this is a good feature.

With Shazam you can connect with your friends to see what music they have been listening to and tagging. A stream of your friends' tags appears in the Friends tab. 

I would recommend that you first download the free version of Shazam and see if the ads distract you. If they do, or if you wish to support the developer, there is a paid application- known as Shazam Encore- available on the Android Market. You can find it here. The free ad-supported version of Shazam can be found here.