Lightning Review: Midomi

By Dieter Bohn
last updated

Today's Lightning Review comes from FoilTape, a review of Midomi, free on iTunes (opens in new tab). Most people have been raving about Shazam for identifying music, but Midomi seems to work better with humming and the like. Let's see what FoilTape thinks!

Midomi calls itself "the ultimate search and discovery." It's a FREE, cool and engaging app that definitely has scored 'wow' points with me. Midomi is a song recognition program that you can sing to, hum to, talk to, or type to. You can even hold your iPhone up to your car stereo to capture the sound. Midomi then searches its database and tries to decipher your best karaoke attempt and gives back likely matches.

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I tried it a few times and rate its accuracy at around 70%. Chances are that you'll get your title back in the list of responses. For these screenshots, I help my iPhone up to laptop speakers playing the opening lines of 'John Deere Green' (guitar and drums only, no singing) and Midomi found the result right away (3rd img). From the result screen, you can buy the song on iTunes and search YouTube for related video (4th img).

A fun bonus...when you sing or hum your song, Midomi will let you hear other's singing and humming the same song! (5th img) That's sure to get a laugh. I cracked up when I heard some Asian 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da'.

If the program didn't crash my iPhone the first time I used it (it's been fine since then) I'd give it 5 stars.

Pros

  • WOW factor
  • Intuitive and simple
  • FREE

Cons

  • Crashed my phone on 1st use
  • Accuracy only about 70%

Rating: 4/5

Dieter Bohn
Dieter Bohn
11 Comments
  • I stumbled across this one myself last night; the family had a couple of hours of fun playing "Don't Forget the Melody". (For some imcomprehensible reason, it seems much more accurate when my wife is singing than when I am.)
    It did not crash once for the two or three hours I was running it, which I actually found quite surprising given what my iPhone has become since upgrading to the 2.0 firmware.
  • Now this app can be useful for people who don't know the song they are listening to. I think it's pretty cool, http://blabtech.blogspot.com
  • How on earth did you get 70% accuracy? I've been using this app a lot over the last few days, testing how accurate it can be, and I've gotten dismal results -- somewhere around 30% accuracy if that. Even the feature that should be the most reliable, "grab", is inaccurate more often than not. The "sing" mode has only been able to identify the song once.
    While the idea is great, I have had terrible luck with it actually functioning the way it's supposed to. I'll stick with Shazam for now, which has yet to produce a wrong result for me at all.
  • I can't wait to get my iPhone 3G... I just found this new availability checker website... been checking it constantly... http://pixelspotlight.com/3GAvailability.html
  • I like this program, I don't like that I can't sign into my account from my iphone tho, they need to update
  • I agree w/Jason, accuracy is low for this app. I compared Midomi side by side with Shazam on a friends iPhone. Shazam went 7/7 while Midomi was 2/7. I like Midomi's interface and results screen better, but accuracy wins out every time.
  • Cool idea for an app, but the only problem is that this thing is so inacurate, its really hard to justify whipping out my iPhone to use it.
  • I love midomi app. The accuracy has been 100% for me. I was in LA and was listening to KTNQ and midomi found all the songs it was playing.
    My son used the say/sing part and it also found the singer anf songs. The singing part was a lot of fun. I dont think shazam has that option.
    Great job midomi. We love you.
  • I feel so much happeir now I understand all this. Thanks!
  • 4yX7a5 rbvlagspixin
  • Lmao. She tries so muck to break that record she's trying anything. I bet we'll see a remix and an acoustic version again and of course DISCOUNTED.