Zapping tracks with Shazam

Shazam is a genius way to identify a song that’s

playing using your mobile phone. Right now, I’m

in a cafe. What better way to test Shazam than

to see whether it knows what music is playing

here? I certainly have no idea.

I whip out my phone, open the Shazam app, and

touch the screen to start recording the chilled-

out electronic music that’s beating out of the

speakers — a process that takes about ten sec-

onds. Shazam — my app recognizes the music

that’s playing and displays it on screen within a

few seconds. It’s by an artist called Zeb, whom

I’ve never heard of — but that’s the point of this

magical, well-established app. Turns out that

the track is part of a Chill Out Cafe compilation

album released by an independent Italian label

called Irma Records — all background, coffee-

drinking kind of music. That’s something new I

learned today!

Shazam uses special digital fingerprinting

wizardry to identify (or tag) the track from its

impressively huge database. The free version

of Shazam gives you five free tags a month.

The fact it needs to hear only a few seconds

of music makes it even more amazing. You can

then choose to share your newly discovered

track on Facebook or other social networking

sites, or buy it from iTunes.

So, where does Spotify come into this Shazam

discussion? Apart from being a quick and clever

way to discover new music, Shazam Encore

(the paid app) also has a neat Play in Spotify

feature that lets you go directly to the Spotify

app and start streaming the music.

At the moment, only those who’ve upgraded to

a paid-for version of the app — such as Shazam

Encore or the charity version, (Shazam)RED —

can use this feature, but Spotify says it plans

to eventually roll it out to the free version of

Shazam. To stream the music in Spotify Mobile,

you need a Premium subscription. But even if

you can’t use the Play in Spotify feature, there’s

nothing stopping you from using Shazam to note

the name of the track you liked, which you can

use to look it up on Spotify when you’re back at

your computer.

Popular posts from this blog

 Examining the origins of Spotify websites You can have a lot of fun discovering all the Spotify-friendly websites and tools out there. I’ve found that many of them started off in order to fill a certain need. For instance, Kieron Donoghue developed ShareMyPlaylists.com after he discovered there was no easy way to get other people to check out his songs (this was way before Spotify introduced social features; you can read an interview with Kieron in the sidebar “Behind the scenes at ShareMyPlaylists.com,” in this chapter). And Gigero, featured in the section “Gigero,” in this chapter, started off as a university assign- ment to create a web service, according to co-creator Filip Engberg. He and his former classmate Robert Åberg, both from Sweden, created Gigero after realizing there was no service that showed upcoming festivals in an intuitive way. To make it easy for people to dis- cover new music, they also decided to insert Spotify links to all artists attending...
Read more
 How Get Satisfaction works Whenever there’s a bug you want fixed or a missing feature you’re after — or you just get stuck trying to do something — simply go to the Get Satisfaction forums and submit a question. You can also submit an idea for Spotify’s devel- opers to consider, and other people can vote for whether they like your idea. For example, at the time of writing, close to 1,000 people want gapless playback in Spotify (where there’s no pause between songs), and almost 500 people are wishing for an easy way to report problems with the music (such as instances when bands that have the same name appear in the same artist stream). People can follow threads, or posts related to a particular topic, to keep up to date — replies to a topic can go straight to your e-mail so that you don’t need to keep checking the site for the answers. Oh, and if you absolutely love Spotify, you can choose to flatter everyone working there by clicking the Give Praise button and typing a f...
Read more
 The Idea Behind Panel Layers You can think of a panel layer in Manga Studio as a page within a page. Each panel layer acts as its own page file, with the ability for multiple image layers, just like the main page. Rulers, guides, and other tools that you would use on the main page can all be used within a panel layer. Only the section of the page covered in the panel layer can be shown at any time. This helps focus your attention on the one part of the page. What’s more, each panel layer is independent of other panel layers. So, anything you work on can overlap onto a different panel layer, and the other panel layer isn’t affected by it. You may see the scribblings from the other panel layer, but the art on the current one is untouched. The idea here is to give you the freedom to really go crazy with your drawing. Need to draw the entire body of a character in a scene to make sure the half that will be seen looks correct? No problem. Anything you draw that you don’t want to show c...
Read more