I’m sure, all of you have run into this tricky situation : You don’t know the song title, you just remember some musical element and you are desperately trying to figure out the song. I’m listing a few tools that will help you narrow down your search.

If you remember the lyrics…

You can try out my custom music search tool which searches the 9 best lyric websites for an exact match of your typed lyric. To restrict the search, type in your query within quotes (“). If you have any other data like the genre/artists/release-date, make sure you type it at the end of the search to make the results more relevant.

If you know how to sing it…

You can hum it or sing it on Midomi (through its website) and let it identify your song. The results are quite accurate if your microphone works fine and if you aren’t an extremely pathetic singer. Unlike Midomi, which is completely automated, you can use NameMyTune. This service allows users to record themselves, singing or humming a part of the song and then letting other users figure out the details. You can also listen to recordings of other users and identify their songs. After a match is reported, the uploader is emailed the details. A similar service is WatZatSong.

If you remember the beats or can tap to the tune…

The next best option to tap out your song on the keyboard is SongTapper and let it figure out your song. Although initially, when I tested the service to identify the songs I already knew, the results were not that great. Only after watching the video example did I get the tapping technique and get better results.

If you remember the melody…

MelodyCatcher will use your melody to fetch the song title. You can use it’s onscreen Java Applet to play the melody using a virtual keyboard or upload one through a “midi” file. If you have a keyboard plugged in, you can select that as the input for the on-screen keyboard and use it to play the melody. Musipedia has all of the above features along with a contour based search. To use melodic contour search, “all you need to know is whether the tune goes up, down, or if the pitch stays the same.”

If you have a part of the song…

Two dedicated mobile apps that can help you in your music identification quest are SoundHound and Shazam. Both function similarly : record a clip of your song (10-15 seconds) and search for a match in their database. These apps are available on all mobile platforms and are free. Apart from identifying tracks from the original versions, SoundHound is capable of recognizing any live event recording or humming or whistling of tune which Shazam cannot do. For those curious people who are wondering how services like these are able to convert music to some computer-readable data and store it, this paper will help you uncover the mystery.

If you still cannot find the song…

Forget the song and move on. It’s better than being unsatisfied about not being able to find the song name.