Listen App Brings Audio Recognition to the iPhone

Just released into beta, "Listen" a new app for the iPhone allows you to recognize the music you hear. It is very early days and the team of 1, Erica Sadun (of TUAW fame), is running a beta, but it is a great new addition to the music armoury of your iPhone.

When combined with an online music service like Last.FM, iLike.com or Pandora.com the application is a bombshell. Last.FM in fact has already been collecting a massive amount of music fingerprint data from their users and this is the perfect application of that data, providing portable scrobbling and audio recognition at the touch of a button.

Judging by comments on the developer’s site the app already works great, though some users have experienced trouble, it is a beta of course, and the power of it plus the possible applications are immense, and it really puts music search and discovery right in a user’s hand and going head on with services such as those offered by Shazam.

How Does It Work?

Nothing speaks more than a picture, so here is how >>

Really it is as easy as holding the music up to the speaker or as near to the sound as possible and letting the application work its magic by sampling and then processing the results online to provide you with the necessary feedback.

In the background, Listen uses the existing Sony-Ericsson WAP gateway for processing the results and would in theory be relatively robust to background noise. In addition, it nly needs to sample a small section of the song, rather than requiring the entire track for the fingerprint.

Conclusion: The Downside

In reality there is always a flip side and if this app has any it is that you will need to be online to process the data. It would be great if the developer could create a way to store the data and provide results at a later date, when you are home and able to get online, for one. Otherwise I can see no faults and the application will be a super enhancement to both the iPhone and to online music services. They should snap it up!

Find out more by visiting the Listen Application Site .