Sound Hound offers free unlimited song tagging

Anyone who's been using Android since the early days probably knows about Shazam, the music recognizing app that wowed us with its ability to listen to a song and immediately give you details about the track. It was one of the first big-name apps available for Android, and it was free. A year or so later, they changed their business model to a premium app that cost $5. The free version only allowed you to identify 5 songs per month.

Sound Hound, an app that performs the same task emerged later on for both iOS and Android and was marketed in a similar fashion; free versions with only 5 tags, and unlimited versions for five dollars. The key difference, however, was that Sound Hound also identified songs by humming or singing, not just hearing the official album or radio version.



It was an awesome idea and worked extremely well. Sound Hound must have also been happy with the results, since they recently announced that the free version now allows 100% free, unlimited song tagging. The free version has ads, of course, and the five dollar, ad-free version is still available. This makes Sound Hound the first app of its kind to offer free, unlimited song tagging, and it works by either listening to the official track, hearing you sing, or hearing you hum. It's quite powerful.

Sound Hound is available free in the Market right now. To download it, search Sound Hound, tap here from your phone, or scan this QR Code. Be sure to tell your iPhone friends, too, since the iOS version also now allows unlimited tagging.

This app is extremely impressive. I had my doubts when I heard it could tag by simply hearing someone hum a song, but I tried it and it really works! It's infinitely more valuable than Shazam for that feature alone, not to mention the fact that it does unlimited tagging for free. With Shazam, I was always avoiding tagging songs since I never knew when I might need it. This is an app I really like having on my phone, ready for when I need it.

---

I've had Shazam forever, and I think I've used it maybe three times. It's just apparently not something I find myself needing to use very often. Although, usually when I do want to find out what song is playing, Ryan's standing right there and has already whipped his phone out, so I don't need to use mine anyway. But...I love that I have the option. It's such a cool idea for a program, whether it's super useful or not. And, I love that Sound Hound not only is free and unlimited, which is awesome, but allows singing and humming. Because I can definitely see myself using that feature a lot more often, to be honest. I haven't actually played with this program yet, though (I'm trying to think of a song to test it with that won't be too "easy.")