Apple's latest iPhone commercial showcases Shazam, an app that listens to music playing nearby and tells you which song it is... sometimes...

Shazam, the cell phone application that listens to music playing nearby and tells you which song it is (sometimes) has come to the iPhone. It's kind of cool to be able to point your iPhone at a speaker and find out the name of the song you're listening to.

There are limitations. Shazam will not listen to you attempt to sing some song you have vague memories of and figure out what it is. It works by comparing soundbytes to its extensive audio database of songs, and your karaoke-ish attempt to render a song is probably not in that database.

But how extensive is this database? How likely is Shazam to recognize a song?

I tested Shazam out on tunes I already knew, to see if its database was as good as mine.

Here are some songs of varying levels of obscurity that Shazam nailed outright:

  • F U Right Back (Frankee)
  • Jerry Was a Race Car Driver (Primus)
  • Sometime Around Midnight (Airborne Toxic Event)
  • Fast Cars (The Buzzcocks)
  • Mole from the Ministry (Dukes of Stratosphear, an XTC side project)
  • Maiden Voyage (Herbie Hancock)

Some successes were kind of surprising. It identified "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin—not the original version from Led Zeppelin IV, but the one from the BBC Sessions album, from just the first five bars, correctly naming the source. It distinguished between two different versions of Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (also known as "Theme for Lester Young"). It also recognized "So Long, Mom" by song satirist Tom Lehrer (though it took two tries).

Some near misses: it identified the demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from the Beatles Anthology 3 as coming from the "Love" album. (Granted, the Love remix used that demo as source material.) Other songs were recognized only after multiple tries. Comedy tracks were recognized—usually not the track itself, just the artist and album.

But a number of songs were missed entirely, including "Alligators Getting Up" (Curve) and "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" (Firesign Theatre). "Girl of My Dreams", a classic punk song by Bram Tchaikowsky, wasn't recognized at all (although "Blank Generation" by Richard Hell and the Voidoids was). And "Strands of Rain" by progressive goth grunge band Eleven was confused with both "Non Stop" by Start Trouble and "Rock N Roll Dream" by Crooked X.

Still, this app is a lot of fun. Holding your phone up in the air somewhere where the muzak is actually offering up something interesting (this happens more than you'd expect nowadays) really does tell you what the song is more often than not. But the part of not being able to sing into it—believe it. Take it from someone who tried singing "Ah-oooooooo, werewolves of London!" while "Sweet Home Alabama" played on the radio in hopes of confusing the app. It didn't work.