Tunatic

Pros

• Simple to install and enable.
• Non-invasive desktop app with small screen footprint.
• Has a low volume on the sound meter that shows it is listening to the song.
• Puts music files in appropriate folders automatically.
• Gets the majority of music information the user is searching for.

Cons

• Tunatic doesn't recognize a lot of less known songs.
• It may sometimes mislabel music files it finds.
• Some users complain that the software needs to work with a bigger database to be a good. tool for finding something obscure or new.
• Some users have had to contact tech support for usage problems.

Tunatic is a free music identification program software developed for Windows and Mac OS. Based on sound for the computer, Tunatic is the very first song search engine that requires a microphone and Internet access to 'hear' what music is playing and then tell the user what song the music belongs to.

To queue the software to listen to something playing on the PC,the user needs to setup this capability using a drop down click for the user to program Tunatic to listen to the microphone on the PC or to listen to music playing on a sound card. Whichever method is used, a click on Tunatic's ‘search’ button, will automatically transmits the song's features to the Tunatic server; the server, in turn, searches its database (the database is created with information that users can upload with a program called Tunalyzer but is only available for Mac users) and retrieves the the title of the song and the name of the artist along with a link for more information if a match is found.

Conclusion

Tunatic is free and relatively easy to set up. It give music lovers a reasonably good chance at finding the name of a song and linking directly to it. It is an added convenience to find favorite tunes via this software that can be downloaded for Windows and Mac operating systems. If users own a Mac OS X v10.2 or higher, they can download Tunatic v1.1 and Windows 2000/XP users can download Tunatic v1.0.1b. As the companion of Tunatic, the Tunalyzer can be used to scan the user's computer for music once it is installed and enabled. This is a helpful database to utilize when a song can't be found in Tunatic's database; however, it analyzes and sends the song's audio marker and detailed data, such as genre, artist, and title and so forth to the Tunatic server. With this type of setup, this same song can later be recognized by other Tunatic users.

The advantage of many people installing and enabling the Tunalyzer is that many more songs, especially those that are not as well known or newly released will be able to be identified through Tunatic. For those interested in downloading this freeware, a list of the pros and cons of using it are summarized below:

Pros

• Simple to install and enable.
• Non-invasive desktop app with small screen footprint.
• Has a low volume on the sound meter that shows it is listening to the song.
• Puts music files in appropriate folders automatically.
• Gets the majority of music information the user is searching for.

Cons

• Tunatic doesn't recognize a lot of less known songs.
• It may sometimes mislabel music files it finds.
• Some users complain that the software needs to work with a bigger database to be a good. tool for finding something obscure or new.
• Some users have had to contact tech support for usage problems.