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Sometimes there's nothing nicer than seeing an app you like get a new coat of paint. Today the popular app SoundHound was updated to v.8.0.2, bringing with it a brand-new look that makes it even easier to navigate and help you find the songs you love. Or, at least, the songs on the tip of your tongue you heard one time playing in a coffee shop that sounded kind of cool. Don't worry, SoundHound won't judge you for not knowing what it was.
There's Shazam, there's SoundHound, there's Google's "what's this song?" and if you have a Sony device, there's TrackID. It's Sony's music recognition service that a lot of users defaulted to because it was preloaded on their devices and because it did a decent job of telling you the title of the song and its artist, while also providing a way to listen to songs, watch their videos, check artist biographies, and save your discovered tunes to Spotify.
SoundHound may have just become one of the best ways to listen to Spotify on your phone. The app has had Spotify integration for years, first allowing you to add songs you find to your Spotify playlists, then stream these songs with LiveLyrics and listen to curated playlists, and now it has added full playlist support.
It can be hard to keep up with all the major voice assistants - Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, Alexa, the list goes on. SoundHound, perhaps best known for its music recognition app, has been working on its Hound voice assistant since 2015. At CES, SoundHound announced they have partnered up with Onkyo and Shenzhen to produce Hound-powered speakers and robots, respectively.
SoundHound is a bit like Shazam, but on steroids. If it wasn't for Shazam's integration with OK Google, SoundHound would be the only music identification app I have on my phone, because it doesn't just do searches of music playing around you, it can also recognize songs you sing or hum. It works more often than you'd think, even with a couple of missed lyrics, out of tune notes, and even half-accurate hums.
The music discovery app SoundHound has introduced its own voice control feature, which is triggered by "OK Hound." This means SoundHound can be used hands-free in the car or at a party when a cool song comes on and you want to impress your friends with your music knowledge. However, it only works when the device is awake and SoundHound is open.
Google's various flavors of voice control are neat, not to mention extremely useful thanks to deep integration with Android. But Mountain View doesn't have a monopoly on speech interpretation: Microsoft has made a pretty compelling case for its cross-platform Cortana system, to say nothing of the similar entries from Apple and Amazon. SoundHound threw its hat in the ring last year with the semi-proprietary Hound app, though you had to be part of the beta to check it out. Today Hound gets a public launch, and everyone can play with it with no prerequisites.
Tech companies regularly spin their products as innovative revolutions that disrupt existing standards and push humans further along the evolutionary tract. So when each new app comes along with promises of raising the bar, it's easy to be skeptical. Just because SoundHound recently released a competitor to Google Now, that doesn't mean it will be any good.
Google isn't the only word that can follow OK. SoundHound has developed a voice assistant of its own, and while the project is still in invite-only beta, the newly available app is clearly going after Google Now. From the moment you utter the words OK Hound, you know you're in for something similar, but different.
SoundHound is one of the apps you can use to recognize those songs you hear playing in the background, whether it's in a commercial or in a department store. Now its developers are bumping things up to version 6.3 and giving everything a spiffy new look.
You've got a few choices when you need to know what song is playing in the background, but today there's another reason to choose SoundHound for your audio identifying needs. Version 6.0 brings a new interface to song, album, and artist pages. There are also a few more small tweaks.
We've grown accustomed to features taking a long time to make the leap from iOS to Android, but some are more aggravating than others. Back in 2011, SoundHound introduced the ability for iOS users to access their music search and discovery libraries across multiple devices, but nearly two years later, that feature had yet to make it over to Android. That changed today. Now Android fans also have the ability to restore music libraries when installing SoundHound onto a new phone or tablet. When a new user fires up the mobile app for the first time, they will be prompted to create a new account that will enable syncing across their devices.
Nothing brings a smile to my face like the words "Tablet Optimized," and thanks to SoundHound, I'll be walking around with a little grin all day long. The music recognition service has updated its Android app to include a fully realized tablet UI and a few other performance enhancements. Here are a few screenshots for comparison (taken on my Nexus 7):
[Download] "What's This Song?" Sound Search Widget From Jelly Bean (No Root Needed)
One of the new features that ships with Jelly Bean is Google's Sound Search widget that helps identify songs after listening to short samples. If you've
One of the new features that ships with Jelly Bean is Google's Sound Search widget that helps identify songs after listening to short samples. If you've ever used SoundHound or Shazam, you know exactly what this does. The difference is this widget is pre-installed on Jelly Bean, comes directly from Google, and hooks right into Google Play.
Version 5 of the popular music-identifying app SoundHound just hit the Play Store, bringing a handful of enhancements and improvements to the app.
Visit the Android Market today and you'll see one of the spotlights is a sale: "10 Days of Offers: Top Premium Apps, 10¢ Per App." They're not kidding when they say premium, either; just check out today's deals:
The developers of SoundHound, a music recognition app, have decided to update the free version of their app to allow an unlimited number of music IDs, instead of the previous limit of 5 each month.