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Have you ever had that moment where you heard a song and wonder what’s its title and who’s the singer? I have, all the time. When on the move, whenever I heard a nice song (especially a foreign language song), I will record it down with my iPhone and use Midomi to identify the title of that song. However, when I am on my computer, I will use Tunatic to identify the song title instead.
Tunatic is a free and small software (for Mac and Windows) that anyone can use to identify songs by sound. It is only 500K in size and only take up 440KB of your computer space.
To get Tunatic to work, you have to feed it with song input. The most common (and easiest) way is to use connect your computer to an external microphone and point it to the music source. It may seem dumb and stupid, but it works.
In the event that you do not have an external microphone, some of the ways that you can do include:
When you first open Tunatic, you will find that it occupies only a small fraction of your desktop and little configuration option. In fact, the only option you can configure is to choose the sound input source.
- plug your sound source directly to your computer, using the line-in method. This is actually the best way as there won’t be any loss in sound quality.
- If you are using Mac, many of the later models come with a built in microphone, which means you can use Tunatic instantly.
- If you are playing music directly from your computer, you can select “What you hear” (also named “Stereo Mix” or “Mixed Output”) as input.
When you are ready, simply play the sound and feed it in to Tunatic. Click the search button on Tunatic to get it to retrieve the song information from its database.
According to its website, Tunatic supports any genre of music (except classical). Being someone adventurous, I decided to try out different type of music and see if it can detect them correctly.
First I try out the oldies English pop song. No problem for Tunatic.
Next, I try out Jazz music. Once again, it detects the songs fairly quickly.
The next attempt is a Latin salsa song. No sweat.
The last attempt is a popular Chinese song, and it detect the song again. However, due to the language setting in my Windows computer, it is not able to display the Chinese character properly.
For all the songs that I have tried, it brings me satisfactory results. If you happen to find out which genre/language of songs that it can’t support, do let me know.
Once it have successfully detected the song, a small arrow will appear beside the name of the song. Click on this arrow and it will bring you to its website where it will show you the link to buy the song from iTunes, download the song as a ringtone, or to search for its lyrics. Not too bad for a simple software like this.
What it does not do
While Tunatic works great at detecting music, it does not contain any data about the track info and album arts, nor update the meta-tag automatically. If you are searching for meta-tag auto updater software, MakeUseOf does have a great article about this- 4 Easy ways to Fix music tags and organize library.
Also, Tunatic does not response well to voice. If you sing or hum into the microphone and wish for Tunatic to find that song for you, you will be disappointed.
Conclusion
This is definitely not a great software that will save thousands of life, but if you are like me, who does not have the habit of managing your songs and have the sudden urge to find out the title of that song, then this will just be the right software for you.
Tunatic is currently available for Windows 2000 or higher and Mac.
If you are aware of any free program tool that can identify songs by sound please share them with everyone in comments.
Taken from makeuseof dot com.
Personal info: I, myself, have been using Tunatic for two years, and love it. The time I discovered it, I got facinated, and still am, until today. Some thing I use to do, is record parts of music songs with my phone ( When I'm not at Home), and then I drop it in Tunatic. Like magic, it gives me the name of the song.
I found an old topic that shows "Tunatic" name. However, it does not explain anything, and it's not in the tutorial area. Hope this is useful for everybody like its being for me.
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