By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Got a catchy tune in your head, but have no idea who the artist is? Midomi.com says it can help, you can type in keywords to search for songs, or you can hum a few bars and see what comes up. They even allow users to record songs in their online studio and says the next time someone searches for it, your result could be first. Content is king and user generated content is pretty much free.

Do you ever find yourself humming a song whose title, to your frustration, you don’t know or can’t remember? New search Web site Midomi is designed to actually identify that song for you in as little as 10 seconds.

Launching in beta mode on Friday, Midomi allows people to search for a song by singing, humming or whistling a bit of the tune. The site then offers search results that include commercially recorded tracks or versions of the song recorded by others who have used the site. The technology also lets people listen to the exact section of each of the results that matched their voice sample.

The underlying speech- and sound-recognition technology, dubbed Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System, or MARS, differs from similar technologies in that it looks at a variety of factors for recognizing samples, including pitch, tempo variation, speech content and location of pauses, said Chief Executive Keyvan Mohajer, who has a Ph.D. in sound- and speech-recognition from Stanford University. Source: News.com

We Say: This looks pretty cool, but I can’t think of any good songs to try, the generic searches I did try did not return the results I expected, but I don’t like most of the crap that’s out there anyway. Voice recognition hasn’t worked very well in the past, so I’m not expecting very good results there either. Does anybody have a mic to try it out?