Shazam vs. Midomi

By LL Cool C

Many of you have heard of Shazam, the little iPhone app that will tell you the song that is playing on the radio after listening to it for ten to fifteen seconds, but little has been said about Midomi.  It offers more features the Shazam, but is it really the choice for you when you need a song guessed?

Midomi has added features such as saying an artist’s name or saying the name of a song, but the feature they really want to set it apart is the ability to sing or hum a song and let it find it for you.  They suggest singing or humming ten seconds or more for the best results.  I decided to do a little testing of this.  I sang Lodi Dodi by Slick Rick, and later covered by Snoop Dogg, for a good 24 seconds .  As you can see in the image below not one of my results have anything to do with Lodi Dodi.

The next feature I tested was Midomi’s search based on a saying a song title.  I had a little more success with this.  I simply said Lodi Dodi and it searched around for it.  You can see it found a live version of Lodi Dodi by Slick Rick, but it is misspelled, the second and third results are not correct, and there is no Snoop Dogg version in sight.  I could however listen to the song right here from the results.  I am impressed by that feature.

I decided to give Midomi a shot to go directly head to head with Shazam when listening to music playing from iTunes.  I played the first 20 seconds of the Lodi Dodi by Snoop Dogg.  I was surprised that it brought back no results.

I decided to test this same clip of the song using Shazam.  It has one simple feature and it does it well.  It listens to the music and then tells you what it is, simple as that.  I played the first 10 seconds of Lodi Dodi and Shazam, pun intended, it found it.

Midomi has a future, possibly a very bright future.  The best part about it is that if it does find the song you are looking for you can play it right there from the application.  With a little more time and updates I think Midomi will become a better app and could surpass Shazam in popularity simply because it offers more.  For now Shazam is still the program to get to guess your music from the radio or TV.