Virgin Mobile's "Song ID"

[Mr. Botch]

I'm being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and will probably be getting my first cell-phone after the holidays.

In collecting brochures from the various companies, I noticed this blurb in Virgin Mobile's prepaid phone options:

Song ID: Hold your phone up to almost any song that's playing, dial *43, and hit Send. We'll text you back with the song title and artist name. For real!

That would be quite a trick, if it worked. Does anyone here use VM, and does this feature work as advertised? Any idea how they do it? Is it computer recognition with a huge database, or a bunch of guys in India immersed in Western musical culture?

This won't be a deciding factor in my final selection, but it would be kind of a neat trick if it actually works, and a feature I even use maybe twice a year.

[blue2blue]

I don't know the particulars of Virgin's service but the PC system audio recorder Replay Music does a pretty good job of recognizing individual songs. [Replay Music is sometimes referred to as a "stream ripper" -- but it actually records your system audio and allows you to save it as either an uncompressed wav file or in various mp3 formats -- it doesn't defeat any DRM, so as long as it's used for Fair Use provision recording (ie, for personal use only), you're on the up and up.]

 

Replay Music has a brief blurb about the technology somewhere but it's pretty vague as I recall. I believe the music recognition service is used by other companies, as well, and repackaged to their customers.

 

But I can say it doesn't work by file IDs, file sizes, etc, since it never sees whatever the source files were, streamed or otherwise. I was recording a friend's band on a local college station's internet feed and Replay Music actually recognized a couple records they played waiting for the band. (And didn't recognize others, even a couple of non-obscure ones. So, the tech ain't perfect. But it WAS pretty gee whiz... It supposedly works with regular radio, records, etc.)

[Jeff Leites]

Not to change the topic, but we needed another cell phone just for the occasional, "I'm running late", "Where you at?", and possible emergency calls..... just zero to a few minutes a month. I checked serveral of the prepaid type deals, and found VM to be the best. I bought the phone on line from VM, and got $20 worth of free air time which covered the cost of a basic phone, signed up for automatic purchase of $20 worth of airtime every 3 months (or if it hits $5 first), which keeps the phone active, and gave me another free $5 of air time. I signed up for the 18 cents a minute plan, which would be high if the phone was used a lot, but since it's not, the cost comes out to less then $7 a month. Also, since it's kept active, the unused air time balance is rolled over. My only gripe is the ring tones. I'd like it to sound like a phone... warble, or ring. The least offensive ringtone that came with it was "Low Rider".