Ever hear a song on the radio and wish you knew what it was called or who the artist was who made it? Shazam can tell you. Shazam is a music recognition app that samples the music of interest, analyzes it, and sends it to the Shazam server for recognition.

The Shazam server identifies the music and returns the name of the tune, the artist, and associated information such as the album cover artwork and the date the music was tagged.It really works as simply as this: You hold your phone up to the speaker playing the music, and initiate the Tag Now function. I was viewing Shazam on my Nokia N97 touchscreen, so I touched the “Tag Now” function on the screen, but for other versions of the application on S60 3rd Edition and Series 40 devices, activating the tagging is just pressing a single button on the phone.

The application then listens to the music for a few seconds (about 10 seconds in my case; your connection may vary). As it does, it draws a circle around the Shazam logo to let you know that it is working.

Within a few seconds, the Shazam server correctly identified the music that I had fed it, including:

Linger, The Cranberries; Cry Baby, Janis Joplin; Mean To Me, Harry James; Painter’s Song, Norah Jones; Falling Slowly, Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova; Brother Bear, Phil Collins; and Come Together, Joe Cocker.

I thought that the Joe Cocker tune was an interesting test, because it was a cover of a tune originally done by the Beatles, and Shazam correctly distinguished between the two. Some tunes I sampled at the beginning of the track, some in the middle, and some at the end, and the Shazam server nailed all of them. Shazam claims that it has more than 8 million music tracks in its database, and that it is growing every day.

Could I find limits to the Shazam server’s recognition capabilities? Yes, I fed it ‘I Speak Six Languages’ and ‘I’m Not That Smart’ from the current hit Broadway musical ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’, and the Shazam server could not recognize the tracks. Since those tunes have talking at the front end of the track leading into song (typical for Broadway musicals), I tested the process by feeding it a similarly structured track, ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’, from the original London 2005 cast of the play ‘Mary Poppins’, and Shazam correctly identified the tune.

I also fed the application the tune ‘I Don’t Know’, a track by Brett Rothenhaus, a rising New Jersey-based artist who specializes in music for pre-schoolers, and the Shazam server did not recognize the track. Shazam did, however, correctly recognize ‘Toot, Toot, Chugga, Chugga, Big Red Car’ by The Wiggles, which is a pre-schooler classic tune.

Overall, I would give the Shazam application an ‘A’ for amazing, both in concept and execution. Not only did the application recognize a staggering array of different types of music, but it also recommended similar music for each the songs recognized. Finally, it also gave me a link for each to the Nokia Music Store, where the music could be downloaded directly to my phone.

The application also stores listings of the music that you have tagged for easy reference.

For more information about Shzam, watch this short video demo:

You can download Shazam for free from Ovi Store. It is compatible with a broad range of Nokia Series 40 and S60 devices.