Below is a table of online music databases that are largely free of charge. Note that many of the sites provide a specialized service or focus on a particular music genre. Some of these operate as an online music store or purchase referral service in some capacity. Among the sites that have information on the largest number of entities are those sites that focus on discographies of composing and performing artists.

Our final song identifier app, Musixmatch, used to be paired up with Spotify to provide lyrics. While the two are no longer connected, Musixmatch is another app that recognizes songs as well. Because Musixmatch is more of a lyrics app than a music ID app, it doesn't focus on popular charts like the others (though it does show new releases). A new music service with official albums, singles, videos, remixes, live performances and more for Android, iOS and desktop. Pop but Medieval Music remix? I found on discord. Posted by 2 hours ago. If you want to identify or locate a song/artist/album.

Database	Services	No. of tracks	No. of releases	No. of artists	Notes	License	Full free access
ACRCloud	Music recognition & audio based music retrieval	~40,000,000[1]	Commercially available with SDKs, APIs for file scanning, airplay monitoring, shazam-liked features	Free trial available in 15 days
AllMusic	Music information and reviews.	~20,000,000[2]	~2,200,000[2]	Song samples only.
Choral Public Domain Library	Sheet music archive of choral and vocal music in the public domain or otherwise freely available for printing and performing	36,869[3]	Yes
Discogs	• Database: user-generated cross-referenced database of physical & digital releases, artists, and labels. With catalogue numbers, codes, and all other markings taken directly from each release. • Companies/organisations: cross-referencing all others involved in music production (record companies, manufacturers, distributors, publishers, rights holders, venues, studios, etc.) • Images: for releases, artists, labels, and other companies/organisations listed. • Marketplace: for trade of physical music releases.	151,200,000[4]	10,000,000[5]	5,000,000[5]	• Multi-lingual. • Free membership (which also removes all site ads). • Marketplace lists over 35 million items (largest physical music items marketplace online). • 1 billion edits.	PD/CC0[6]	Free API and XML data dumps.[7]
Encyclopaedia Metallum	A heavy metal encyclopedia with information, complete discography, links, images, and reviews.	~1,900,000[8]	~265,000[8]	~102,000 bands, ~535,000 artists[8]
freedb	Identification service for CDs.	freedb.org and its services was shut down in June 2020.	GPL.
The Freesound Project	repository of Creative Commons-licensed audio samples.	445,000[9][10]	CC Sampling Plus.
Genius	Allows users to provide annotations and interpretation of song lyrics.
Gracenote	Identification service for CDs and other media.	~100,000,000[11]	~8,000,000[11]	1 billion 'submissions'.[12]
International Music Score Library Project	Music scores and parts, mostly scanned from publications now in the public domain; some recordings.	42,000 (370,000 scores)	14,500 composers, 387 performers.[13]	PD/CC-BY-NC-SA.
Jaxsta	Online database of official music credits	• 115,000,000+ Individual Music Credits • 100,000+ Credits Ingested Daily	API available.
Last.fm	Music community website.	~26,484,587[14]	~3,304,568	~1,383,340	Automatically creates online library/collection of listened to music and generates recommendations.
LyricWiki	Lyrics wiki on Wikia.	~1,653,416[15]	~159,749[15]	~82,226[15]	Yes, but no access to the lyrics via API.
MAQAM	Largest Database of Arabic and Middle Eastern music artists, tracks, and albums.	20,000	1,200
MetroLyrics	Lyrics lookup.
MuseScore	Sheet music	6,487,223[16]	780[17]	Also includes free music notation software to enable a wide range of instrumental music scores to be created, printed and shared	Music is available under a variety of licenses. It is tagged and searchable by license.	No—free accounts are permitted five uploads; beyond that, payment is required
MusicBrainz	Open content music database.	~28,608,635[18]	~2,350,941[18]	~1,559,670[18]	GPL/LGPL/PD/CC-BY-NC-SA.	Free API[19] and XML data dumps.[20]
MusicMight	Biographies and discographies.
Musixmatch	Audio based music recognition and provision of song lyrics.	Yes.
Mutopia Project	repository of free contentsheet music.	2,247[21]	328[22]
Prog Archives	Progressive rock discography and reviews.	0	63,978[23]	11,308[23]	No special rights granted[24]	Yes. Log on to submit band information
Quantone	Database of physical/digital products, venues, photos, artists, participants, composers, movements, labels, publishers and rights.	12,000,000[25]	301,000	For commercial business-to-business usage only.	API available.
RateYourMusic	Discography and reviews	0	4,417,376[26]	1,431,300[26]	API is planned but not functional as of 2020.[27][28]	No special rights granted. Web scraping is prohibited.[29]
Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM)	Database of historical music manuscripts and music printed editions that includes full descriptions and current physical locations in libraries worldwide.	>1,400,000	~40,000 composers	Search available in 5 languages. Link to digitized images when available.	CC-BY	Yes
RollDaBeats	Drum N Bass music database, physical releases only.	175,969[30]	62,103[30]
Wikifonia	Free lead sheets in MusicXML format, contributed and editable by users.	6,236[31]	Was active from 2006-2013
WhoSampled	User-generated database of comparison between original tracks and covers, or songs that use samples.	460,000	150,000
Database	Services	No. of tracks	No. of releases	No. of artists	Notes	License	Full free access

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Ho, Vanessa (2016-10-06). 'LyricFind becomes more easily available to developers'. Retrieved 2017-07-24.
2. ^ ^ab'Coverage Statistics'. Allmusic. Retrieved 2011-06-12.
3. ^'ChoralWiki'. cpdl.org. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
4. ^'Data Dumps'. Discogs. Retrieved 2015-02-21.
5. ^ ^ab'Explore Releases On Discogs'. Discogs. Retrieved 2018-06-27.
6. ^'Discogs API v2.0 Documentation'. Discogs. Retrieved 2017-10-01.
7. ^'Discogs API Documentation'. Retrieved 2015-02-21.
8. ^ ^abc'M-A Statistics'. Encyclopaedia Metallum. Retrieved 2015-03-28.
9. ^Corbera, Frederic Font (5 April 2020). '15 years of Freesound!'. The Freesound Blog. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
10. ^Corbera, Frederic Font (15 January 2020). '2019 in numbers'. The Freesound Blog. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
11. ^ ^abGracenote |
12. ^'Gracenote |'. Archived from the original on 2014-08-27. Retrieved 2014-08-27.
13. ^'Library statistics'. IMSLP. Retrieved 2010-12-17..
14. ^Last.fm « CBS IMG
15. ^ ^abc'LyricWiki Statistics'. LyricWiki. Retrieved 2017-07-16.
16. ^'Sheet music'. Musescore.com. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
17. ^'Free Sheet music sorted by Artist'. Musescore.com. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
18. ^ ^abc'Database Statistics'. MusicBrainz. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
19. ^'Musicbrainz API Documentation'.
20. ^'Musicbrainz data dumps'.
21. ^'Mutopia: Latest Additions'. The Mutopia Project. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
22. ^'Mutopia: Browse by Composer'. The Mutopia Project. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
23. ^ ^ab'ProgArchives.com'. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
24. ^'progarchives.com/Legalnotice.asp'. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
25. ^'Data and API Coverage Statistics'. Decibel. Retrieved 2011-03-29.
26. ^ ^ab'RateYourMusic.com'. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
27. ^'FAQ'. Rate Your Music. 16 February 2019. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
28. ^'RYM Webservice / API'. Rate Your Music RYMzilla issue tracker. 16 February 2019. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
29. ^'Terms of Service'. Rate Your Music. 16 February 2019. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
30. ^ ^ab'About RollDaBeats'. RollDaBeats. Retrieved 3 December 2020.
31. ^https://app.box.com/s/h4a8x8w01e70grijkaw0

There’s probably over a hundred million songs in the world and the number is certainly increasing each day. With that number of songs, the chances of you listening to a song that you really like and not knowing the title or the author is pretty high. The old school trick in identifying an unknown song is try to catch one or two sentences of the lyrics and look for it in a search engine such as Google. This method should work most of the time but definitely not for some instrumental genres such as classical, dance, electronic, jazz…

There are apps for smartphone such as SoundHound, TrackID, MusicID and Bing Audio (selected countries only) that make it so much easier to recognize unknown songs by running the app and touching a button to start recording a short clip to perform the music recognition. As for desktop computers, music recognition is also possible through these free software or online services.

1. midomi

If you’ve heard of the popular SoundHound app for smartphones, it actually started off from midomi, a free web based music recognition service. This is why you can find SoundHound being advertised in most parts of midomi’s website and even using their favicon!

Midomi uses flash player to activate the microphone on your computer so that it can capture the music for recognition. All you need to do is click on the button that says “Click and Sing or Hum” followed by clicking the allow button when you are prompted to give camera and microphone access to midomi. You can either sing, hum or even play the music if you’ve managed to record it and midomi will attempt to recognize the song. Fast, no frills and easy to use since there is no need to install any third party application for midomi to work other than Flash Player.

Visit midomi

2. Shazam

Shazam is a very popular music identification app for Android with nearly 2 millions reviews averaging 4.4 out of 5 stars! Fortunately you can also find a desktop version but only available to download for Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store.

It is a no brainer to use Shazam. Run the program, click on the big Shazam icon and it will start spinning to start recognizing the music coming from your microphone. Upon finding a match, Shazam will show the album cover together with links to buy the music.

Download Shazam

3. musiXmatch

The music recognition feature called “Music ID” found in musiXmatch is powered by Gracenote and if you didn’t know, Gracenote has the largest database of music and video metadata. This would mean that musiXmatch has the ability to recognize a lot of songs. The desktop version of musiXmatch is also quite similar to Shazam in the sense that it is only available for Windows 8.1 via the Windows Store.

musiXmatch primarily aims to find and match lyrics to your music tracks found on your computer. You can find the Music ID function by right clicking anywhere on the app, and select Music ID from the top menu. Then click on the microphone icon that says “TAP TO START” to start recording the music for recognition.

Download musiXmatch

4. AudioTag

Although AudioTag’s database only has nearly 2 million tracks which is nowhere comparable with Gracenote’s database that is used by musiXmatch, AudioTag has successfully helped to recognize 1.5 million queries so far. It also offers a slightly different method in recognizing music which is either through uploading a full or short fragment of audio or specifying the URL to the audio file in WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, FLV, AMR, MP4 and many more.

AudioTag offers a great alternative to music recognition for people who do not have the permission to install third party apps like Shazam and musiXmatch, and also if they do not have a microphone.

Visit AudioTag

5. WatZatSong

If none of the apps or online services above managed to help you recognize an unknown song probably due to the low quality of the recorded music, your last option would be to record or upload the sample music and let the community of WatZatSong help you identify it.

Before you can post a sample, you must first sign up for a free account that does not require verification through email. After signing up and logging in, click on the POST A SAMPLE button located at the top of the website and you’ll given a choice of whether to record the sample using your microphone, or upload the music file. Select the genre that you think the music belongs to and also the language. Enter any comments you have about the music and click the Confirm button.

Visit WatZatSong

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“AHA Music” proven to be very good at identifying music from various regions {English; Korean; Vaporwave}

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Better than Midomi in my opinion! Comes with 2 modes of search

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Thank you for this article. Someone else found the song for me on WatZatSong by listening to the recording I made of 1 minute. Very much appreciated.

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I can tell you I finally found and bought one of my “songs” a couple of days ago after not hearing it for 24 years. It played occasionally on the radio. I did not know the author or the title, and I typically listen only to instrumental music, and the only recording was the one playing in my brain.

This particular one was “Short Stories” by Ray Obiedo, with a distinctive bass rhythm in the first half. These trendy tools like SoundHound and Shazam are absolutely worthless for locating instrumental music sans a complete database.

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Anything based on lyrics is redundant to what a Google search provides and of no value.

Music Identification Website

The real challenge is this:. You don’t know the artist, you don’t know the title, and you CERTAINLY don’t have a recording. All you have is a tune in your head… From something you heard twice on the radio 30 years ago.

Until we get there, these tools are pretty much worthless.

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Until we get there, these tools and others like them are pretty much the only chance you’ve got. It’s either slim chance or no chance if you don’t try, I’d choose the first option.

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Greg & Halgoo – if it’s only in your head – try downloading MuseScore or Finale… then write it as music…
then try to get that “identified”…

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You are right, John. I’ve worked extensively in MuseScore for my own compositions and it’s probably time to do just that… Kudos on that suggestion.

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“From something you heard twice on the radio 30 years ago.”
The average Radio play the same bulls**t over and over and over and over.
So what you need to do think about the genre of the song (to reduce the decade it was originally played at the radio since just because it was made 30 years ago, this doenst mean the song was created at that year) and then look at the top billboard charts and the song will be there, I heard at some research paper that 2 new songs are added to the average radio stations (that play the same stuff over and over) each week so at max you have 104 songs per year and some you will discover few seconds before it start that is not what you want.

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nice articel, I once found my song within only 7 second provided, then upload it on WatZatSong, and replied in a 7 minutes for an arabic song artist and title!.

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Thank you for providing such links. But they are not what I expected. I wish better. I thought different music have different frequency, so if they compare to the songs on their big song library, It may be nothing. I mean that will be way way simple at all. I am wondering that I hate cross plateform incompatibility these days. even Android phone or iphone sucks. What kind of tech, this is 2017. I hate….

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Thank you very much that helped a lot …

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Wow thanks to this post I discovered that musixmatch have a feature to indentify songs ♥

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fantastic! AudioTag did it for me to figure out one piece of music from the movie Solace: M83 – My Tears Are Becoming A Sea). Thumps up! :-)

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Very useful info….thank you ray….

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Goog article Ray. Do you know if there’s a search engine for very short sound clips?

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great post raymond. you are the best.

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thanks a lot

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nice cool information

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Nice article I’m thankful that I’ve found it.

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Excellent post, really needed this long time ago

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Yap the kind of information I was looking for it especially for karaoke type applications. Thank you again Raymond.

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Thanks Ray

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Thanks Ray. Very useful and it really works :-)

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Music Identification Program

wow this is a nice article Ray. I sometimes find myself unable to download mp3 because I don’t know the title. This is really great for techno songs!

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Excellent!

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