A use for Shazam

I’ve been triaging my music cassettes. Most is commercial, and most went straight into bags or the thrift store, but a lot was recorded from radio, and a fair bit of that never got properly labeled. I’ve been playing bits on a cheap boombox and being frustrated when I finally remembered the existence of Shazam. It works pretty well considering the poor audio quality. It can’t cope with anything that wasn’t actually published (e.g. local concerts) but it’s let me ditch a lot more of the tapes and reconnect with some stuff I like but had totally forgotten about. If only it would let me whistle to it so I could find out what the ear worms of the day are…

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I, too, am converting many old cassette tapes to digital. Some of these were recorded from vinyl and labelled. Others were recorded from FM radio stations and have nothing more than a date and the radio station. I have had pretty good luck using Shazam to identify songs.

I was about to download Shazam a few months ago until I learned that Shazam is built in to iOS and can be found in Control Center.

You can hum or whistle to google.

I recently finished (or came close to finishing) a similar task, ripping my radio-recorded cassettes.

Most of the time, I’ve been able to identify unknown tracks by throwing key lyrics into a search engine.

Except for one track I have which nobody can identify. Lyric searches show nothing. I uploaded an MP3 to Shazam and Google, but neither produced any results. (Does this mean I can use it in YouTube and not get a content match violation? :slight_smile: )

It was recorded from the radio in the 80’s. The only explanation I can think of is that this was from an artist who sent tapes to local radio stations and never actually got published. Unfortunately, it also means I’m probably never going to be able to get real metadata for this song unless I share it with a DJ (of whom, I know nobody) that might have played it at the time, and even then it will be dumb luck.