How to recognize a musical composition heard on the radio, included in a selection of unlisted tracks on YouTube, heard in films or videos, in order to add this composition to your playlist? How can I find out what songs are stored on my computer under the names TrackNo. or with names in the form of a jumble of symbols in order to get acquainted with other compositions by their artists? Without knowing the author of the song, its performer, or its title, this can be done using various means offered by the Internet. Let's consider these tools for desktop devices.
1. Search by song words
The easiest way to recognize a song you heard somewhere is to enter the words you remember from it into a search engine.
But it doesn’t always happen that you remember the words of the chorus or bridge. If the words from the verses are etched into your memory, the search engine may not find a not particularly promoted composition. And display in the results of a web page where these words simply appear. In order for the search engine to search for exactly the same word order as sung in the song, the key query must be placed in quotes.
Another way to weed out unnecessary search results is to search first on YouTube or filter the search engine results by the “Video” criterion. The third way to filter out unnecessary things in search results: you need to add an addition to the keywords, directly indicating that the lyrics of the song are being searched. In Russian we add the phrase “text of the song”, in English – “lyrics”. And we add more quotes to maintain word order, for example:
- Lyrics of the song “Jellyfish, we are friends.”
- lyrics "look at me, i'm a beautiful creature".
If an inaccurate wording of a song passage comes to mind or some of the words are simply forgotten, we put an asterisk instead of these words.
If the musical composition you are looking for is in a foreign language, and your command of it leaves much to be desired, you can try to speak the text as you hear it into the Google or Yandex voice input form.
2. Radio station website
Today you no longer need to call a radio station and ask what kind of interesting song was on the air half an hour ago. Almost every radio station has its own website, where the broadcast history is usually kept. And in this history you can track by time which track was played on the radio earlier.
If it is not possible to recognize it from the lyrics of a song or we are dealing with music without words, you can resort to special recognition tools that take a sample of the composition itself as initial data and search it in its database. Like the famous Shazam project. The latter's apps are only available for iOS, Android and Mac. In the Windows environment, you can use numerous alternatives to this project.Each of the tools offered below has its own database, but in any case, the more popular it is, the higher the probability of recognizing a composition will be.
3. Chrome extensions for recognizing online music
If a musical composition is playing in a browser window, you can recognize it using special extensions from the Chrome store. They will work in all browsers built on Chromium.
AHA-Music extension
After installing the AHA-Music extension, its button will appear on the browser toolbar. While on the tab with the song being played, press the AHA-Music button, wait a little and see the result - the name of the song and its artist.
Recognized tracks will be displayed in the extension window until the history is cleared. Their names and artists can be copied or selected and searched for them from the context menu.
AudD extension
Almost identical to the previous extension – AudD. Here, too, being on the tab with the track being played, click the extension button on the browser toolbar and wait for the results. We can copy the results or search for them from the browser context menu.
4. Web service
If audio files are stored on your computer without identification, with names like TrackNo. or something like that, the AudioTag.info web service will help you find out the name of the composition and who performs it. You need to upload an audio file to the service website.
Enter a captcha similar to solving a simple arithmetic problem.
And wait for the result.
5. Web service Midomi.Com
https://www.midomi.com
Another web service for song recognition works on the same principle as Shazam, by taking samples of songs through a microphone.
You can bring a microphone connected to your computer to the speakers, or you can sing the words of the song yourself.And the service should ideally recognize the track. But only ideally. Firstly, Midomi.Com has a meager database of Russian-language songs; this service is best used to identify tracks in foreign languages. Secondly, not every computer microphone can provide a correct sample of music. If the song is played on a Windows device - no matter in a browser window or in a local media library player, it is better for Midomi.Com to directly substitute the system sound. To do this, you need to go to the sound settings, go to the “Recording” tab, turn off the microphone and turn on the stereo mixer.
A stereo mixer is usually implemented by installing an audio driver from the official website of the motherboard or sound card.
