Official Soundhound musid ID app now available

While Windows Phone 7.5 has Bing Music on board for ID'ing songs, it's not available everywhere nor does it have many bells and whistles. Enter Soundhound, a popular music ID service similar to Shazam but in many ways, better. The service is extremely popular on iOS and Android so it's nice to see it finally arrive on Windows Phone--better late than never, right?

The app is free, Mango ready and pretty well thought out. You simply tap the big button, let it sample the music and it'll ID it for you. From there, you can "buy" the song by jumping to the Zune Marketplace directly (nice), share the find on Twitter and/or Facebook or take a gander at the lyrics.

Coolest feature? Pin the "listen button" to your Start screen. With one-tap, it hops into the app and starts listening for the song. And really, that's what it's about, right? You need to launch music ID apps as fast as you can to get that song before the commercial is over or the radio is changed. So brilliant use of the Live Tile there.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get it to work with our Facebook, but perhaps a glitch on our end and the quick-launch mentioned above is still a tad slow. But for a v1.0, we're impressed and look forward to future updates. Highly recommended.

Grab Soundhound here in the Marketplace for free. Thanks, Richard E. for the tip!

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and wearable tech. He has reviewed laptops for over 10 years and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, Arm64 processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, performed polysomnographs in NYC, and was a motion-picture operator for 17 years.