Audio fingerprinting tool Shazam is one of those auto-magical things that impresses pretty much anyone who sees it working on an iPhone (although it is available on other devices albeit at a cost).
Usually you’d use it to identify music playing in cafes, bars and clubs, or on the radio. But given that most of the music I actually want to find out more about isn’t often what is playing in these sorts of venues (the occasional earworm excepted), I’ve not really had much use for it in a day-to-day setting.
(Side note – when I was playing a set at the recent Optimo gig in Sydney I noticed the girl working the sound desk at the Oxford Art factory continuously loading a Shazam-equivalent on her mobile phone to try to identify what they and others were playing!)
However . . . I’ve been watching a fair few TV series recently, catching up with stuff I should have seen whilst otherwise engaged in parental duties, and the the best use of Shazam is to find out the details of songs featured in soundtracks. For example, the UK teen series Skins is notable mostly for its eclectic musical choices but the DVD releases feature different music to the broadcast versions as a result of bizarre rights issues that I can’t quite fathom. And like most TV series you can forget about getting the music listed in the credits – but with Shazam even a 10 second clip of sound used to set the mood of a scene can be identified pretty reliably.
Now if there was a similar tool for quickly identifying sample sources . . . .