Picture it: you're riding in the car and a great song comes on the radio. You're dying to know what it is so you can go buy it ASAP but there's no satellite radio receiver to tell you what's playing. How can you find out what song it is? Whip out your iPhone, put it near the car speakers, and watch the screen. Poof! There's the song, artist, and album.No, I am not kidding.
Our own Erica Sadun was inspired by someone who came up with the original idea, she set off to make it happen, and the result is Listen. It's still "very beta" but, hey, it's still one of the coolest iPhone hacks I've ever heard of. Go check it out and let us know in the comments how it works for you.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
1-08-2008 @ 12:16AM
Xavier said...
Is it in Installer yet? It looks too cool!
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1-08-2008 @ 12:24AM
Xavier said...
Woah... It works pretty well...
I tried it with a number of artists and it identified them all... Including foreign language artists like Miyavi...
1-08-2008 @ 4:50AM
Mort said...
Cool
I guess it used a site like http://www.midomi.com/
1-08-2008 @ 12:20AM
(01) said...
Are you kidding? This is quite possibly one of the coolest hacks I've seen for the iPhone so far. If only I A)Listened to the radio and B) Wasn't waiting to jalbreak my iPhone until after the SDK drops. Any word on if there will be any free apps yet, or pay only through iTunes store?
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1-08-2008 @ 12:44AM
Pete Zich said...
Wow, that works amazingly well! It found Bocelli, and even rather generic parts of movie soundtracks, that is way too cool. This definitely goes up with all the other showcase apps in my book.
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1-08-2008 @ 12:51AM
John Russell said...
A very sweet idea. I can't wait to try this. Now if only I had an iPhone.
It also might be worth mentioning Yes.com. They may not analyze the audio in order to tell you the song, but they do have a pretty good playlist for what a station has played.
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1-08-2008 @ 12:55AM
Tim said...
As soon as I heard the commercials for the Verizon phone that does this, I wondered how long it would take for an iPhone app to pick it up. Nicely done!
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1-08-2008 @ 12:57AM
Mystic said...
It crashed my phone. I'm stuck a the apple screen now....
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1-08-2008 @ 1:02AM
Roberto said...
Cool. Now the iPhone needs A2DP and it will be on par with a run-of-the-mill Verizon phone. :P
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1-08-2008 @ 1:03AM
´Jeffrey said...
Works even for Brazilian Music.. Thanks Erica.. wondering if it works over gprs.... just tested here but no deal...
Jeff
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1-08-2008 @ 1:13AM
philster said...
Duuuuude. Awesome!
That Erica is some kind of frakin' GENEEUS!
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1-08-2008 @ 1:14AM
anthony said...
Installed it, launched pandora, it identified Ask Me [Live] by The Smiths, then Superstar Tradesman by The View, then it seemed to lock up when playing the beginning of Broken by Ursula Rucker which was really generic bells and electronic noises and again on Quantalux by Dao. A reset or try again button would be useful.
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1-08-2008 @ 1:15AM
PB said...
did not work for me... when I start the app, all I get is a white screen. which does nothing for a while then crashes and goes back to the menu screen. I rebooted. using 1.1.1
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1-08-2008 @ 3:38AM
kevanhloy said...
you can fix the white screen and crashing my setting the permissions of the application properly. you can do the whole cmod or chmod whatever it is in terminal, but i find it really easy to use fugu, then get info on the app, then change the permission (the last option "octal mode representation") to 0755 from 06something. respring after changing the settings or rest your iphone, whichever is easier for you.
1-08-2008 @ 1:19AM
Fabio P said...
damn, this fucking awsome programm even recognized really old swiss songs. how do they do this?!
really awsome app. fugly, but awsome anyway :D gotta love this girl
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1-08-2008 @ 1:22AM
yonan32 said...
SonyEricsson phones have been having this feature for quite a while now, as a native app that comes preinstalled with the phone..
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1-08-2008 @ 8:18AM
Luigi193 said...
But the iPhone didn't....
1-08-2008 @ 1:24PM
Chris said...
As far as I can tell, this is actually making use of the SonyEricsson web service to do the heavy work. Upload a snippet of music, get the track details back.
Which might mean it'll stop working as soon as they realise what's happening...
1-08-2008 @ 1:27AM
Lars Knudsen said...
Nice to see this come to the iPhone as well. Most other brands have had this for a while (on my SE 850i it's called TrackID). What algorithm are you using for the fingerprint? .. even if the app has been seen before - a robust fingerprint (working in any part of the song) requires an algorithm developed when you're somewhat sober ;-).
- Lars
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1-08-2008 @ 1:28AM
caleb said...
Wow! Simply Amazing. It was only unable to discern one song I tried (it was a punk song, but it was able to determine a less noisy song from the same album, so i have to assume the song was in the database).
It got several albums wrong, but always got the song right anyway. For some of the jazz I tried I don't know if the song I played is the same recording as the album it reported or not.
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