Shazam must be one of my absolutely favorite apps on the iPhone.

Shazam by Shazam Entertainment Ltd. has been around since 2002 but I believe that their app on the iPhone has made them famous.

For those who haven’t tried it yet or simply haven’t heard about it, Shazam is a nifty little app but truly impressive. And best of all: It’s completely free!

So what is it all about? Shazam is a music recognition application. What does this mean? Nothing much to explain there: You are sitting in your office, listening to the radio and hear a track that you have been searching for ages. You even remember trying to sing it to the guy at the record store who thought you were completely crazy. So this time you want to be sure to get the title right.

So you simply launch Shazam, hold it to the speaker and click the “Tag Now� button in the top right-hand corner. You’ll then see following screen:

Shazam will first of all listen to the track. At this point I must say that I have tried to fool the software by making background noise and testing it on songs that have been out of print for decades, but Shazam has performed marvelously. Shazam will then will send the recorded track to their central database and analyze the track as you can see on the two following screenshots:

Now we have several possibilities: First of all you may not have a connection to the internet at that point of time. No problem, because Shazam will store your previously recorded track and as soon as you have a connection to the net you simply re-launch the application, click the “Untagged track� in the list and Shazam will do the job.

If you have a connection at this point of time, be it Wifi, 3G or 2G, Shazam shall return following screen if your track has been identified:

You’ll be able to see the song title, artist, record label, album artwork and date/time the song was tagged. If available, Shazam will also display links to purchase the song in iTunes, YouTube videos, lyrics, album reviews, artist bios, artist discographies, and more. The YouTube videos can be watched directly on your iPhone too.

Little tip at this point: Click the album artwork to zoom in and have a better look at it!

Now this is what it looks like when you have tagged several songs:

Shazam will simply store them in a list which you can consult anytime you wish to.

There may be a couple of downsides to this marvelous app, but I must admit that it is overall a masterpiece of technology.

So have fun tagging songs all over the place and I do hope this small review was helpful to you!

For more information visit http://www.shazam.com/iphone