Okay, so I've seen the iPhone 3G commercial, I've heard folks here talk about it, etc.
Tonight I'm sitting at my pub (yeah, I drink around the holidays
) and this vixen is playing some really neat songs on the jukebox (old classic country
and R&B, oddly enough...a really neat mix of pedal steel-dripping stuff, followed by a funky-as-can-be Wilson Pickett tune; I was pretty much in heaven).
Anyway, many of the songs playing weren't known to me (very few "hits", even though I recognized the voices singing: George Jones, Otis Redding, Conway Twitty, Wilson Pickett, Tammy Wynette, etc.).
Remembering that I'd downloaded/installed Shazam a week or so ago, I thought "okay, here's a perfect time to test...".
I'll be damned if it didn't nail
everything (about six songs total, spanning the more obscure end of two genres not exactly "done to death" these days: 60's-era country and R&B/soul). She wasn't playing Kenny Chesney, Snoop Dogg, etc., after all. And I'm a fan of this stuff, and even I hadn't heard 3-4 of the songs (which was the reason I fired up Shazam to begin with).
I was impressed!
But, what impressed me more is that one of the songs was someone doing a cover of a famous George Jones song. I expected Shazam to get the song, as it's well known, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it didn't come back with the George Jones version, but, rather, the actual version of the person doing the cover.
So that got me thinking...how in the hell, based on the quick 20-second(?) "scan" it performs, does this app do what it does?
It can't be solely based on lyrics because it was bringing back the
cover version, sung by a lesser-known artist, and not the original hit by the original artist.
How in the world does it know this, the difference between the original artist who made the song famous and a version sung by someone else? What all is this app analyzing or listening to/for?
Once again, I'm easily amused at times. But this was pretty neat, even by my low, lax standards...
I can see this little app being
all kinds of useful/handy in situations like this! Saves me from having to walk across the entire joint to read the jukebox, every time I heard something I liked...