SoundHound

SoundHound is one of those apps that you aren't going to use everyday, well most people won't. If you are familiar with Shazam, it's a similar application -- one that lets you use the microphone in your iPhone to recognize music that's playing. SoundHound takes that concept further though, recognizing not only recorded music, but also humming and singing into the mic. Rather uncanny how well it works really.

Here's a video overview of SoundHound from the developers:

The use of the app is pretty simple -- touch the large "What's That Sound?" button and play music, sing, or hum into the microphone for a few seconds. Once the recording is done, it takes just a few seconds for the sound to be recognized. From there you are given a list of possible songs. Each of the songs you can get more info about and many you will be able to play clips from.

In this latest iteration, SoundHound easily beats out Shazam. For one, it's much faster than Shazam in song recognition. Also included in this update are some interesting statistics. You can view what other people are searching for and see what's popular. SoundHound is highly recommended if you are looking for a music recognition app, though if you already have that other one, I'm not sure that SoundHound offers enough for the casual user to justify buying it.