Tunatic freeware for Windows or Mac promises to listen through your microphone to what song is playing and identify the song. This sounded like a neat idea in theory if it actually worked so I downloaded the Windows version and then played songs through iTunes to test. Here are the results:

Bush - Machinehead: At first the microphone was reporting back that the signal was too weak, so I propped up the microphone on a desk stand and angled to point next to the speaker. I also went into the speaker options and raised the level on the mic record. Tunatic liked this setup better, but still failed to recognize the song.
Cher - Believe: using the same setup as above, it took about 15 seconds to identify this song correctly, although it was misspelled:

Cinderella - Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone: identified, they are 2/3
Chlorine - Get To Tomorrow: Decided to try this more obscure song. Result? Nope. 2/4, batting .500.

The real test was pointing to a radio station playing music I didn’t know, so I fired up the Radioshark and used seek to find a station playing music I was unfamiliar with: 100.7 The Wolf. Not being a country fan in the slightest and not listening to commercial radio this made me extra cranky. I mean, it’s like one song and commercials, then more commericals, then news, then one song, then … no wonder nobody listens to commercial radio any more.

Song #1 (complete with static): didn’t recognize. That puts total recognition as: 2/5.

To be fair to Tunatic it would be better to use it to listen to dozens of songs from multiple sources to truly gauge how accurate and useful it is but from my limited review above, it didn’t do so hot. Admittedly, I was surprised it recognized any of the music. A for idea, F for execution, D for accuracy. I don’t belive (misspelling intentional). Grade: D+

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