Review: Shazam iD, TrackID is no longer just a Sony Ericsson thing

If you have a Sony Ericsson device released in the past 2 years or so then you have a most awesome application on your device called TrackID. If you never used it before, here is what you’re missing out on: Once you open the TrackID application you can hold your phone up to a speaker playing a song and within a few seconds you have the name of the track, artist and album you’re currently listening to. This works with the radio as well so you don’t even have to take off your headphones in that situation.

I have long been an advocate that Nokia get off their ass and replicate this application for their S60 powered devices, but my complaints fell on deaf ears. That is until now.

How did I find out about it?

Reading Eldar’s review of the Samsung i450 he mentions Shazam iD about half way down the page.

Where did I find it?

I immediately went off on a quest to find this application, but my efforts were thwarted once I reached Shazam’s website. Not only does this company fail to provide a URL for a SIS file, you have to be a UK resident and send a premium SMS to get a download URL. Who do I know in the UK? The folks over at All About Symbian! I sent an email to both Rafe and Steve asking if they could help me out with this review by giving me the download URL and they did without hesitation, thanks guys.

The link is http://www.shazam.com/shazamid and you have to visit it in your mobile web browser. This should make typing it out a lot less painful:

Let me convince you to download this!

Here is Shazam’s icon. I find it horrible, which is why I’m pointing it out, in hope that they change it in future versions:

The splash screen is the first image on the top of this post, here is what you see after that disappears:

When you click “Tag Now” the application automatically begins to record a short snippet of the audio currently playing. This takes around 5 seconds at best, I didn’t time it so don’t quote me on that:

After it is finished Shazam will ask you to connect to the internet, in this case I selected my provider, Kolumbus:

What is this young, single, mobile phone addict listening to? Rick Astley! The song name scrolls, artist name is right under that and the last line indicates the time when you clicked on “Tag Me.” One more thing, full album art! I’ll come back to what that 1/14 indicates:

When clicking on “Share it,” a text message entry dialog pops up allowing you to send an SMS to a friend who might like, laugh at, or hate this song:

RealTone doesn’t work for me, it just pulls up Shazam’s site, which is useless. Now what did that 1/14 indicate? MyMusic is a list of all the songs you identified. No clue as to the limit of items within that list. Yes I like Modern Talking, no I’m not gay:

Moving one tab over to “TagChart” you can see the most popular songs people are trying to identify:

That is all. A very simple application, it does 4 things: ID the song currently playing, list the songs you tagged, list the songs people are tagging the most and letting you share the name of that track with your friends.

Message to Nokia:

Clone this

Add the ability to “Download now via the Nokia Music Store”

Add the ability for me to identify songs currently playing on the radio

Let me see what songs my friends are tagging

Let me see what songs my country and other countries are tagging

Do it before Sony Ericsson does because they already have plans to implement everything I just said.

Update: A developer asked me if Shazam and TrackID poll the same database, they do, it is called Gracenote. I’ve also decided to throw in one more screenshot of some songs I had playing over my stereo: