Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve focused on a number of websites and tools that you can use to find a song by its lyrics, such as Brad’s article on the top 5 sites to find song lyrics online or David’s article on how to find song titles with just a few lyrics you do know. Today, I’d like to cover a very new solution that’s available for the most common scenerio – when you don’t know the title of the song or any of the lyrics, but you can hum or whistle the song just fine!

Voice Recognition Technology Saves The Day

There are a number of cutting edge computer technologies that have always fascinated me, mostly because they represent areas where computers are finally entering into the realm of artificial intelligence. Two of those include image recognition and voice recognition.

While I’ve not followed the state of the art of each field, I’ve always been under the impression that both areas of computer intelligence have a very long way to go. However, what would you say if I told you that I’ve discovered a computer program, an online application to be exact, that you could sing, hum or whistle a tune to and it could accurately guess the title of the song. Images of science fiction movies, where starship crew members seek the help of the ship’s AI computer system come to mind. Well, it’s no longer science fiction – this technology is now a reality at Modomi.

Midomi itself isn’t exactly a very special or unique website. Just like every other website where you can search for and purchase music online, Midomi lets you research music, bands and more. You can watch music videos, listen to music clips or even join the Midomi fan club for any particular music group. However, the true heart of Midomi becomes apparent (and the site absolutely comes alive) when you start becoming “fans” of particular groups. As you enter fan pages, you’ll become aware of a Facebook-like social network of music lovers. As I was browsing through this site, I noticed something rather unique compared to most other music websites. Midomi once again takes advantage of interactive audio by allowing fans to make and upload their own recordings of the music that they’re fans of.

As a fan, you can listen to any of these uploaded recordings. I joined the Green Day fan club and immediately saw user dude34bja’s recording of When I Come Around at the top as the most listened to recording. I clicked on it and was blown away by her fantastic acoustic rendition of the song. You too can record your own version of any of your favorite songs if you click on the “Studio” menu option at the top of the Midomi page.

Record your songs, and if your good enough you’ll very likely develop your own fan base right within the Midomi online community. Get enough votes and you actually appear as a “Midomi star.” In addition to recording music, the Midomi site is just completely integrated with audio at every turn. You can even upload audio comments at the site instead of typing them.

Now, all of this is very cool – but what about the whole reason we came to the site? That little box at the top of the first page that reads, “Click and Sing or Hum.”  Does it really work?  I decided to test the accuracy of this online application by humming Losing My Religion, by R.E.M.  After clicking the text box, the recording began.

I hummed the first 16 seconds or so of part of the song – no words whatsoever – just straight humming. I was absolutely convinced there was no way that this application would be able to recognize the song without a single line of lyrics. When I was done I clicked on “Click to Stop” and waited for the results. This is what came up.

The top “guess” was a perfect match. Unbelievable. I figured it was a fluke – a completely lucky guess, so decided to try it again with a more difficult tune that wasn’t so modern – I went back and hummed the first 15 seconds of “Over the Rainbow,” sung by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. I chose this song because there is absolutely no way I can hum it perfectly in tune. After 15 seconds of forcing the recorder to suffer through my cracking and screeching as I attempted to hum some of the tune, I clicked stop and grinned. No way it’s going to know what that horrid noise was. The following were the results.

I have to say, if anything convinced me – this did. As far as I can tell, you only need to know the general tune of a song – no title and no lyrics required. This amazing little Midomi web app will remind you of the title after just a few seconds of humming. Even better – you can download the app to your iPhone and carry around this little song-title-reminder app with you everywhere. Hard to believe? Visit the site and give it a shot – and let us know in the comments section below whether it blew you away. I know it did for me. Have fun!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• The Top 5 Sites to Find Song Lyrics Online (26)
• Songr – A Desktop MP3 Search Engine That Also Downloads Songs for You (14)
• Identify The Name of That Song with Tunatic (16)
• How To Conduct a Song Search By The Lyrics You Know (6)
• Make Use Of Podcast #30: More Current Google Searches (8)

Now, there are plenty of ways to do a song search by lyrics. Brad has already shared with you the Top 5 Sites to Find Song Lyrics Online

For the most part, Google does wonders in trying to find songs online. If you type in the lyrics you know, in quotation marks, followed by the word lyrics (something like “mmbop bop bop doowop” lyrics), you’ll usually get what you’re looking for. But, you’ll also get pages loaded with popups, tons of advertisements, and lots and lots of incorrect lyrics.

If you’re looking for an easier, better song  search engine, check out LyricRat. LyricRat is a new application attempting to make sure you always find that song you heard and liked.

Let’s start with the coolest feature: LyricRat is on Twitter. You can send any lyrics snippet to @lyricrat, and you’ll get a reply back with the name of the song, as well as a link to more information about it. This, in itself, makes LyricRat a better way to do a song search by lyrics than a Google search – when you hear a song you want to know, just send the lyrics in a text message, and the answer will be waiting in your Twitter feed when you get back.

If you’re not a Twitter user, there’s still plenty to like about LyricRat. When it finds the song you’re looking for, you’re taken to a page about the song. There’s a link to preview the song (to make sure it’s actually the song you were looking for), a link to buy the song, and another link to more information about the song or band.

There’s even a list of possible alternatives (just in case the one you want is a cover, or you entered common lyrics, or something like that). They’re all Amazon links, but Amazon’s certainly the best source of information and products for most bands, so it’s a sensible integration.

If you’re not even right about the lyrics, LyricRat can often still figure it out. No idea what Sting’s saying in any song by the Police? Just guess what it sounds like – you’re probably wrong, but if you’re hearing the same wrong lyrics as most other people, you’ll be given the right one. I tried a bunch of commonly misheard lyrics, and LyricRat got the song right more than half of the time.

As I said before, Google usually handles these things quite well. If do a song search by lyrics a lot though, as I do, you’ll appreciate a simple, attractive site that’s not totally cluttered with ridiculous popups, malware, and “buy this ringtone!” ads. LyricRat, especially since it plays so nicely with Twitter, is a great way to quickly and easily find that song that will soon be forever stuck in your head.

How do you hunt for your favorite song?

Image Credit: Kevin Lawver

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• The Top 5 Sites to Find Song Lyrics Online (26)
• Identify The Name of That Song with Tunatic (16)
• Find A Song Title Just by Humming The Lyrics (19)
• Songr – A Desktop MP3 Search Engine That Also Downloads Songs for You (14)
• How To Make Lala Your Music Player of Choice (7)

I’ve scanned the internet to save you from ever having to encounter this and found the 5 best sites on the net for song lyrics. I evaluated them for a vast library of Pop, Oldies, Indie and everything in between. The sites need to be easy to navigate, the design should lend itself well to lyric browsing and the search function should be prominent without too many ads getting in your way (let’s face it, they have to make money somehow).

So, here we go, top sites to find song lyrics online – counting down to number one.

#5 – LyricsPlanet.com

Started back in 2000, LyricsPlanet has had some time to collect thousands of lyrics for you. A quick search for Bon Jovi returned 66 songs for a band that had 10 total albums. That means almost every song they’ve produced has been covered.

After a bit more snooping, I noticed that they have the Billboard top songs on the homepage but those songs looked like they were the top songs end of last year. It hasn’t been updated in a few months. LyricsPlanet uses a simple design that makes the search prominent on the front page but that is really the only usable function on the front page. The only other things visible are ads, links to other sites and the un-clickable, and dated BIllboard top songs. Using LyricsPlanet to find older, popular songs works well but for the newer and lesser known lyrics, I’d try any other of the 4 sites below.

#4 – MetroLyrics.com

In a huge leap forward, MetroLyrics stands heads and tails above LyricsPlanet. Upon visiting this site, you are presented with lots of valuable information about the music world. You are shown upcoming hot releases, the real current top hits and a nice and neat search bar.

One nice feature about their search is that you can type just the parts of lyrics that you remember and it will find you that song. (Similar to sites Lyrster and Lyricsfly) Remember that time you were humming a tune and wondered what on earth that was from? MetroLyrics can tell you.

Navigating the site was quite easy but the way the search results were presented threw me off a little. The results are presented with the Artist and Song Title highlighted on different sides of the column and then partial lyrics displayed below which confused me. All in all, I’d say they have a large selection, easy enough navigation, great search capability and some good features, like a handy iTunes plugin and a forum that distinguish it from the rest. It is worth your time to check out.

#3 – LyricsMode.com

Next in my roundup is LyricsMode. This site caught my attention with their simple layout. The search option is clearly visible on top along with the top 100 songs at that time.

The main feature of the homepage is newly added songs. After a few days of watching this list, I can tell you that it is a great way to discover some cool music you never knew about (Besides these ways we shared with you earlier). Other than the usual criteria of having a vast collection of songs, nice layout, a fair amount of ads that bordered on too many here and an easy search function, I found that the sense of a community is more prominent on this site and I liked that.

There’s no better way to find good music than to listen to your friends and this site expands that to all your friends on the internet too. Due to this community, you’ll find that the lyrics on this site are very accurate because everyone has the option to submit a correction.

One feature that set this site apart was the “Meanings” section. Here the community can write their thoughts on what the Artist was trying to get across in writing the song. I read through a few of these and some of them are entertaining, others are just, for lack of a better word, dumb. Either way, I think this site is certainly worth your time.

#2 – LetsSingIt.com

LetsSingIt is where the lines start to blur between music discovery site and lyrics site which works extremely well. They have an extremely powerful search box prominent on the homepage that made it simple to find any song, artist or lyrics you’re looking for. I got creative and decided to look up MC Hammer on this site. Of course, I went for “You Can’t Touch This”.

As you’d expect I was presented with the correct lyrics for the song but LetsSingIt gives you so much more. There is an artist bio, discography, top songs, pictures, fan pages and the feature that really made the site stand out, a YouTube video of the song embedded in the page. These videos are embedded by the users of the site and are all correctable by other users in case one of the links dies. The video feature made it fun to read along with the lyrics while you rock out to you’re old pal, MC Hammer.

I was torn between the top two sites in this roundup. LetsSingIt fell to #2 due to their design. I think they tried to pack too much into their pages and it makes it seem cluttered. The information is great and visible but in the sidebars, you can get lost.

#1 – Lyrics.com

If you’re looking for lyrics online, I say that there’s no better place to go besides Lyrics.com and with a domain name like that, they’d better be good. All of the features from the previous sites are combined into one and then made even better by the folks at Lyrics. You are presented with a clean, impressive design with minimal ads.

There is great information such as new releases, top hits and most popular songs displayed right on the homepage. A powerful search bar resides on the top that allows you to search for lyrics, songs and artists. Results are displayed in a clean, easy to read way. There is a great community built around the music with many people for you to interact with.

Lyrics pages present you with not only the lyrics but also with a video to rock out to as you scream the lyrics at the top of your lungs. One feature that set this site apart was the dedication section. Those of you love birds out there will like this section to share meaningful songs with your special someone.

Out of all the sites I tried out for this round up, Lyrics.com impressed me the most. It is certainly the best place on the internet to find song lyrics.

Do you use a site that has not been mentioned in this article? Do you think above picks for top sites to find song lyrics are completely wrong? Let us hear about it in the comments.

Photo credit: Samira Khan.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Identify The Name of That Song with Tunatic (16)
• How To Conduct a Song Search By The Lyrics You Know (6)
• Find A Song Title Just by Humming The Lyrics (19)
• Songr – A Desktop MP3 Search Engine That Also Downloads Songs for You (14)
• How To Make Lala Your Music Player of Choice (7)

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:

1. 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.
2. If you are using Mac, many of the later models come with a built in microphone, which means you can use Tunatic instantly.
3. 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 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.

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.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• The Top 5 Sites to Find Song Lyrics Online (26)
• How To Conduct a Song Search By The Lyrics You Know (6)
• Find A Song Title Just by Humming The Lyrics (19)
• Songr – A Desktop MP3 Search Engine That Also Downloads Songs for You (14)
• How To Make Lala Your Music Player of Choice (7)

In fact, I would not describe actionext as a music discovery site. It’s different and maybe even better than that. I would say it’s a music lyrics search engine. You don’t have to listen to random tracks based on a pattern you seem to enjoy. Rather you can search for what you like yourself and create a custom music playlist. Additionally, actionext offers lyrics that anyone can edit in a wiki-like manner. Dive in to see more…

I know, there are other music search engines. However, this is the best I have seen in a long time!

Without signing up you can go ahead and search for artists or songs, browse lists of artists from 0-9 and A-Z, pick a featured album from the frontpage or browse the Top 100 list.

The best thing is that while you’re looking for music and adding tunes, the music player will stay with you and you can listen to what you have collected so far continuously, with only minor interruptions to to page loads.

A search will usually return a long list of results. The quality of songs greatly varies, the volume is not equalized, some songs are live recordings, others are album versions. You can’t necessarily tell the quality by the title the creator gave the song, so of course you can test play tunes before adding them to your playlist. Just click the play instead of the plus button.

Results always come back with two rows. On the left are the audio tunes and on the right you’ll see available lyrics. This is where the wiki-like system comes into play as you can edit the lyrics and submit your changes for review.

As you see you can download tracks and get them as ringtones. But don’t get too excited, both links will take you to services that will charge you for the favor.

To save and keep your playlist, you have to sign up. From there you can copy the code and share it through your website, blog or even myspace profile. That’s right, you can easily add actiontext music player with your playlist in it to your Myspace or other social networking profile. The code will be available when you save the playlist and at the bottom of the page when you’re playing it.

Interestingly, playlists can only be deleted when they’re open. You’ll see a “Delete this playlist” link in the top left above the player. A delete button next to each playlist in the “My Playlists” section would certainly be more comfortable. Also I’m not sure whether the amount of playlists you can create is limited. For this test I made 20. That’s plenty and the site probably allows a lot more.

Here for example is a playlist of artists I have seen live during the past two years. Not all of them, just the best of course.

What is your impression? Is it worthwhile? Are you gonna share some songs with us?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• WriteOnIt – Funny Photo Captions, Magazine Covers & Other (8)
• Watch Hulu & Flash Videos On Your WM Device With Skyfire (7)
• Update all your Social Status Messages with Ping.fm (14)
• Top 3 Sites For Streaming Your Music Anywhere (16)
• The Top Five Idle Time Facebook Games (26)

I grimace when I browse though some of my friends’ playlists and most of the songs are labelled “Track 1, Track 2…. Untitled Artist”. They must have some kind of ESP or monumental memorizing ability to remember what track is by which artist.

Listening to music on iTunes can be more than simply “listening”. It can turn into a pretty interactive hobby which for me, has become an obsession. A fairly rewarding one, at least. Here’s how you can convert from mere music-listening to actively interacting and expanding your music experience. In this part 1, I’ll show you how to enjoy your current music collection.

How To Organize Your iTunes Library

This is the very first step to improving your iTunes experience. How can you truly enjoy your music if you’re not sure who you’re listening to? Label your music properly, fill in their genre (if you’re not sure of what genre your artist/album fall under, check the iTunes store by clicking the arrow link next to the album title. It might not always be 100% accurate as some might argue but it’s a start), rate the songs you like, enter the year it was released – you get the drift.

I spend quite a lot of time doing this, especially after I get my hands on a couple of new albums. My friends think that I’m crazy for wasting so much time but in the end, it’s very rewarding.

Why?

As your music collection gets larger, you’ll find more reasons to organize your music. If you have somehow labelled your songs but haven’t capitalized the first letter of each word and you couldn’t be bothered to redo them again, TuneInstructor can do it for you. It has a lot of other functions but I mainly use it to recapitalize some of the letters which escaped me.

Add Album Cover Artwork To Your iTunes Songs

This is just eye-candy but it subconsciously improves your music experience. In addition to only using your sense of hearing, you’re now adding a visual sense. Wine connoisseurs use this theory – that when more senses are involved, the better the experience. That’s why they look at the wine (vision), swirl it (hearing), smell it (smell) and finally drink it (taste).

The most reliable way to add cover art to your music is to do it individually by album. It takes a little bit of time and effort if you’re starting from scratch but it prevents mistakes from occurring. To do this, I use Amazon Album Art Widget. I find it very usable and almost always finds the cover art I’m looking for. Other applications you may try are Corripio and GimmeSomeTune (which I covered in a previous article).

If most of your music have their artwork attached and you’re trying to find those little buggers which eluded you, there’s a very useful script from Doug’s Applescripts called Tracks Without Artwork To Playlist which will find the songs without any artwork and automatically add them into a separate playlist.

Don’t Settle For Low Quality

Static, buzzes and noise in my music really ticks me off. That’s why I always go for a lossless file format if possible. Right now, I’m settled on Apple Lossless but FLAC is still the most popular lossless format. Music, especially classical or jazz are better appreciated in higher quality because of their sophistication. In the long run, keeping your music in a higher quality, either lossless, 320kbps MP3 or 256 AAC will spare you from re-ripping your songs in the future once your taste for music quality has been acquired. For starters, don’t settle for anything lower than 192kbps MP3.

If you need an explanation about audio files formats, a good introduction would be to check out the article I wrote about audio convertors for Mac.

As I said earlier, FLAC is the most popular lossless audio format but unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t support FLAC. Previously, I had to convert FLAC files into another format which iTunes recognizes. Every time a music file is converted from one format to another, it loses quality. That’s something that makes me cringe. Granted, that loss in quality might not be audible but it’s a loss nonetheless. Then I found Fluke. Fluke is an utility that allows me to play FLAC files directly in iTunes without any conversion and hence, without any loss in quality.

Sing Your Songs (Add Lyrics to iTunes )

How many times have you listened to a song you’d really like to sing along then had to open your browser, search for the song’s lyrics and add them into iTunes? TunesTEXT is a very reliable widget which retrieves the lyrics of the song which you are currently listening to and adds them into iTunes – you don’t even have to lift a finger! Use this together with DesktopLyrics and you will always have your lyrics right on your desktop. No rogue lyric windows to deal with. Whenever you want to view the lyrics, use the Show Desktop Exposé hotkey and boom – sing-along time!

That’s all for Part 1. In Part 2, I will focus on helping you to expand your music library and few other tips to really enhance your iTunes experience.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• The BIG Book of iTunes [Free PDF Download] (47)
• Synchronize MP3s To Non-Apple Devices with doubleTwist [Mac] (0)
• Move over iTunes – Mozilla’s Songbird is Here (42)
• How to Improve Your iTunes Experience (Part 2) [Mac Only] (16)
• Highlights of the Zune 3.0 Music Manager (4)