Learn songs online: Here’s how

Whether at a party, on the radio, or in TV ads. There are enough situations when you hear great songs and want to know the title and artist. Automatic music recognition services do not need more than a short recording and the corresponding song can usually be recognized in a few seconds.

A so-called acoustic fingerprint is used, which describes the sequence of tone and rhythm using a digital code. The technology behind it is so advanced that it can work even without a perfect match with the original song.

So, to some extent, background noise, noise, and even sounds superimposed on a recording are not a problem for music recognition services.

Depending on the provider, you can also use song recognition by quiz, buzz or drums for the song in question. And if you only know a memorable line from the song instead of the exact melody, there’s a solution for that too.

With these providers, you should be able to discover almost every known song in seconds.

Shazam: Apple’s Music Recognition App for iOS and Android

The music recognition service Shazam, acquired by Apple, finds a song’s title and artist in seconds using a short audio recording. However, with Shazam, you have to do without getting to know the songs you sang or chanted yourself.

You can also activate Shazam from outside the app at any time via an overlay or quick access popup, which is convenient. Thanks to the close interconnection with Apple Music and Spotify, you can easily save the identified songs in playlists and listen there.

SoundHound and Midomi: Shazam Alternative for iOS, Android, and Web Browsers

SoundHound for iOS, Android and the browser version of a music recognition service called Midomi works like Shazam, but it reacts a bit slower. Unlike Shazam, you can also allow songs to be recognized by singing, buzzing and whistling.

Songs that SoundHound recognizes can be played directly in the app with a built-in YouTube player or opened and saved to Spotify.

Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa: Recognize music by voice commands

Thanks to Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa, you can use a voice command to automatically identify songs. Siri uses Shazam technology for this and is therefore limited to recognizing song recordings. With the Google Assistant, you can also sing songs or jot them down on your own.

Amazon Alexa Assistant doesn’t actually offer music recognition, but it can at least identify songs based on a set of songs from the lyrics.

Musipedia: Learn about songs through percussion based on rhythm

With Musipedia, which can be used in a browser, you can also recognize songs by tapping the beat on a computer keyboard. This experimental approach is somewhat less accurate than other methods and more suitable for music lovers.

You have to remember the song well to get really good results.

Spotify and Google: discover songs based on lyrics

If you remember a few of the lyrics, you should be able to find them easily by doing a Google search. Or you can use Spotify directly for this. The streaming service is built in to identify songs that work well.