My Music Recognition identifies songs playing on your computer

Have you ever played a video on YouTube in which a song was used that you liked a lot but could not identify because the video itself, description or title did not reveal its title or artist?

Or maybe you listen to Internet Radio regularly and want to identify music that is playing from time to time. Or, you have an mp3 file that is not named properly that you want to identify.

There are quite a few situations where a software like My Music Recognition comes in handy. The free program for Windows can identify songs playing on your computer regardless of the program it is playing in.

This means that it works with media players, web browsers, and other programs that have audio playback capabilities.

The first thing you need to do is install the audio capture service that ships with the program. Once done, install My Music Recognition and start it up afterwards.

Note: The program has a size of about 70 Megabyte which is quite a lot. It may also install dependencies that it may have.

Last but not least, you may want to sign up for an account on Echonest to get an api key which the audio software uses for some of its functionality.

Once all that is out of the way, you will notice that the application is capturing and analyzing at a constant rate when it is running.

To test that it is working, play any song on your computer, or visit a website such as YouTube and play a music video on it. The program should display the artist and song title in its interface after a short while of capturing.

This works extremely well for popular songs. It should be clear that the program cannot identify every song ever recorded properly. With that said, it identified most songs that I threw at it properly. The list included popular tracks from Michael Jackson and Metallica, but also obscure or lesser known songs such as The Four Horsemen by Aphrodite's Child or Bridge To Solace songs.

What it had troubles identifying were some live tracks, for instance a live version of Abba's Waterloo while the regular version was identified properly.

It sometimes takes longer to get songs right, with several capture and analyze sessions, but in the end, music was always identified correctly.

The program keeps track of all identified songs so that you don't have to check the system tray icon all the time for that. When a song has been identified properly, you can make use of its search functionality.

This includes options to search on YouTube, Groveshark or Soundcloud, to find information about the artist on Wikipedia, or the tablature on UltimateGuitar.

Verdict

The most impressive feature of the application is its music recognition. It does a good job at identifying most songs properly and while I cannot say that it will be impressive in your case, it did work really well when I took it for a test ride.