SoundHound has long been one of two premier tune-identifying applications (the other being Shazam), and it’s now introducing a downsized version of mobile song recognition: [itunes link=”http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hound/id437863023?mt=8&uo=4″ title=”hound” text=”Hound”].

Hound is a free app that prompts you to search for a song, artist or album title using your voice. Just speak into your phone’s mic and tell Hound what you’re looking for and it will start searching. Unlike its parent app, SoundHound, the new app won’t accept singing, humming, typing, or recorded sounds.

Hound digs for results from SoundHound’s music database, displaying album or artist art, a YouTube snippet, tour dates, an info page, a shortcut to the digital music store, and lyrics.

It’s also incredibly fast, much faster than SoundHound or Shazam, but you’ll need a little more information on hand than you would using them. While Hound doesn’t really mean a step forward for music discovery apps, it paves the way for SoundHound to step into more voice-search technology, perhaps putting it in direct competition with Nuance and Vlingo.

You can download the free Hound app for iOS in the [itunes link=”http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hound/id437863023?mt=8&uo=4″ title=”soundhound” text=”App Store”] and for Android in the Android Market.

via CNET

William

William Shaub is a performance major at Juilliard who balances a life in music with heavy doses of writing and tennis. He loves tech journalism, and spends an enormous amount of time on a smartphone. You...