By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
One reason people love Music ID apps is their immediacy: You hold your phone up in the air, tag a song, and then you know, more or less immediately, what that song is. This is one of the most magical things our modern phones can do — but even the old, dumb phones from ten years ago could do it, by essentially leaving Shazam a voicemail and getting a text message in return.
Today, audio fingerprinting usage has exploded, with Shazam, SoundHound, and other music identifiers regularly topping the app popularity charts. We even think they’ll end up being the real QR codes, where television is concerned anyway, by allowing you to follow televised links on your smartphone or tablet by identifying the audio in an ad or television show.
Today, Shazam, the leading provider of music identification apps, added an interesting new feature that highlights the need for smartphones to work without being connected to the cloud — just one of the ways that they are becoming computers even as they replace them.
In addition to offline mode, the latest version of Shazam also adds a new interface in the form of “a dial that responds to music,” bigger album art, the ability to search your own tags, sharing to Google+, and enhanced features for the visually impaired.
Download Shazam (free) or Shazam Encore ($6).
(via addictivetips)
