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10 best music recognition apps for Android
It happens all the time to just about everybody. We hear a great song on the radio or somewhere and don’t know what it is. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to figure out a mystery song with little to no information. There are the usual apps for stuff like this along with some wildcards that may be easier depending on what you need. There isn’t much else about the topic. Let’s help you identify some music with the best music recognition apps for Android.
The best music recognition apps for Android:
Beatfind Music Recognition
Price: Free
Beatfind Music Recognition is a serviceable app for identifying songs. It’s powered by ACRCloud if that matters to you. The app listens to the song playing and tells you what it is. From there, it can take you to a YouTube video of it, link it to you in Spotify or Deezer, and show you a preview to make sure it found the right song. The UI is nothing to write home about, but it’s simple and effective to use. Plus, it has some fun stuff like a visualizer. It’s completely free with ads making it one of the better free options in this space.
Chord AI
Price: Free / $9.99
Chord AI is a chord recognition app for stringed instruments. It’s mostly for guitar players, but it should work with other instruments as well. It listens to the sound your instrument makes and tells you what chord it is. It works pretty well and includes some more complex stuff like half-diminished chords and stuff like that. It’s a bit niche, but it recognizes sound well. There are others you can try like Chord Tracker by Yamaha, All Chords by mv^2 Studio, or MyChord by Yallafactory. They all work pretty well.
Google Assistant and Search
Price: Free
Google Search and Assistant are two of the most popular ways to identify music. Google Search is a pretty obvious choice. You simply type the lyrics into the search bar and it usually finds the song you were looking for. You can also ask Google Assistant to listen to a song. It listens and identifies the song you’re listening to. Both of these functions come from the same app so you get a decent two-for-one deal here. Plus you get the extra functions that both Search and Assistant provide. It’s an easy recommendation unless you don’t want a personal assistant app. In that case, read on.
Musixmatch
Price: Free / $16.99 per year
Musixmatch is one of the most popular music recognition apps on mobile. It works with a variety of sources and can display lyrics over top of most music streaming services. The app lets you search for lyrics, find them, and even favorite them so you can find them again later. It even works on Wear OS. The subscription service adds translation to dozens of languages, offline support, ad-free use, and more. The app also doubles as a local music player if you have music stored there. It’s pretty good at what it does and competes favorably with Shazam and Google Assistant.
QuickLyric
Price: Free / $1.99 per month / $9.99 per year
QuickLyrics is for people who already know a song but want lyrics for it. Basically, you play a song, open the app, hit the refresh button, and it shows you the lyrics for that song. In my testing, it also scrolled the lyrics as the song played. The app gives you access to offline lyrics without the subscription cost and it can identify music with your microphone as well, albeit not as well as the big dogs. You can also use it with local music players like BlackPlayer, PowerAmp, Phonograph, and others. To be honest, the buy buttons in the app didn’t work on my test phone, so I’m not 100% positive how much this costs so I made an educated guess based on the Play Store listing.
Shazam
Price: Free
Shazam is perhaps the biggest of the music recognition apps. It works like you would expect. You the microphone to listen to a song and Shazam tells you about it. It not only identifies the song, but also lets you follow s ynced lyrics, add the song to your Apple Music playlists, or watch the music video on YouTube. The app ballooned in size and functionality since its release many years ago and it can do a lot of other stuff. It’s also free. Most complaints about this one are simply the app messing up and not identifying the song sometimes.
Song Finder and Identifier
Price: Free
Song Finder and Identifier is a bit of a diamond in the rough. It’s not overly popular and the name is a little bland. However, it worked fine in my testing. It uses your microphone to listen to a song, identify it, and then it links the song to a variety of streaming services for quick listening. This works on ACRCloud, the same technology as Beatfind Music Recognition, so the performance between the two should be about the same. Other than that, it comes down to extra features and UI preferences. Like most, it’s not perfect and it doesn’t work every time, but again, it worked fine in my testing.
SoundHound
Price: Free / $5.99
SoundHound, like Shazam, is one of the original music recognition apps. It has a long history of solid performance. It’s also one of the few options that doesn’t require a subscription service. Simpy tap the orange button and the app listens to the song and identifies it. It keeps the a history of the tracks you discovered for future reference. There is also a discovery section where you can find new songs from new artists. There is even a built-in YouTube player in case you want to listen to the song right then. It’s effective, has few bugs, and the premium version is a single purchase. We like that.
Most personal assistant apps
Price: Free
One of the nicer things about the personal assistant space is the ability to ask it what song is playing. For instance, if you’re listening to music on an Amazon smart speaker, you can simply ask Alexa what song is playing if you want to find out what it is. Siri also works a similar way. We listed these separately from Google Assistant since Google Assistant goes a step further. However, anyone with a smart speaker can find out what music is playing on their smart speaker basically whenever they want.
Some music streaming sites
Price: Free / Varies
Music streaming services are slowly but surely getting into the music recognition space. It’s nothing compared to the rest of the apps on the list, but it can be pretty handy in a pinch. For instance, Spotify has an advanced search that lets you input lyrics and other markers to more easily find songs you know, but don’t know the name of. In YouTube Music, I’ve had limited, but real success typing in lyrics and finding a song, although I sometimes need to go through several other songs in the list before I find it. If you type in “dance for me oh oh”, it’ll correctly show you Dance Monkey by Tones and I. Not all music streaming services have contextual search like this and sometimes the search gives you only wrong answers, but it is an option and since you probably have the service anyway, it can’t hurt to try.
If we missed any great music recognition apps, tell us about them in the comments. You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists.
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