Donovan just alerted me to this application that runs on the iPhone. A very simplistic description is that it identifies music that you play to it. So, as an example, you hear something playing on the loudspeakers while you’re sitting on the can at your local airport. You pull out your iPhone and run shazam because you want to know what the name of that song and artist is. You let the program listen to about 15 seconds of it and then it returns the results back to you. It keeps track of all the songs that you have ‘tagged’ and then you can buy them individually on iTunes or just continue to build the list. Best of all, it’s free.

I really wonder how much signal processing power it takes to accomplish this. There’s got to be a bunch of people using the application.

I did, however, find one song that it could not identify. I even purchased it on iTunes. It’s called Na Hana Hui a Maui by Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu. They probably didn’t want to bother with the name.