Best Audio Search Engines

There’s probably over a hundred million songs in the world and the number is certainly increasing each day. With that number of songs, the chances of you listening to a song that you really like and not knowing the title or the author is pretty high. The old school trick in identifying an unknown song is try to catch one or two sentences of the lyrics and look for it in a search engine such as Google. 

There are apps for smartphone such as SoundHound, TrackID, MusicID and Bing Audio (selected countries only) that make it so much easier to recognize unknown songs by running the app and touching a button to start recording a short clip to perform the music recognition. As for desktop computers, music recognition is also possible through these free software or online services.

Best Audio Search Engines

An audio search engine lets you search for sounds across the web, and they're always updating with new information.

1. FindSounds

FindSounds searches the web for sound effects, instrument samples, and other sounds in a variety of formats (e.g., MP3, WAV, AIF). You can search using keywords or browse for sound files by category. Direct download links to the files are provided.

2. Midomi

If you’ve heard of the popular SoundHound app for smartphones, it actually started off from midomi, a free web based music recognition service. This is why you can find SoundHound being advertised in most parts of midomi’s website and even using their favicon!

Midomi uses flash player to activate the microphone on your computer so that it can capture the music for recognition. All you need to do is click on the button that says “Click and Sing or Hum” followed by clicking the allow button when you are prompted to give camera and microphone access to midomi. You can either sing, hum or even play the music if you’ve managed to record it and midomi will attempt to recognize the song. Fast, no frills and easy to use since there is no need to install any third party application for midomi to work other than Flash Player.

3. Shazam

Shazam is a very popular music identification app for Android with nearly 2 millions reviews averaging 4.4 out of 5 stars! Fortunately you can also find a desktop version but only available to download for Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store.

It is a no brainer to use Shazam. Run the program, click on the big Shazam icon and it will start spinning to start recognizing the music coming from your microphone. Upon finding a match, Shazam will show the album cover together with links to buy the music.

Download Shazam