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How to Identify Music on a CD

Listening to different kinds of music can expand your artistic horizons. Borrowing a CD from a friend or downloading new music and making a mix can help expose you to new music. Sometimes when listening to a CD a song is unfamiliar, and you may want to learn the song title and artist. Thankfully, with the myriad of technology and information available, doing this is a fairly straightforward task.

Instructions

    • 1

      Insert the CD into the computer's drive and play the music in a digital media player (iTunes, Windows Media Player). Look in the program's window and click on the CD to see the track titles. Some songs have this information written into the file. Most digital media players automatically pull the track tiles from an online database.

    • 2

      Download a song identifier (Tutanic, Shazam, Music Brainz). Launch the program and follow the instructions for song identification. Generally this type of program will "listen" to a song using a microphone, then match the wave forms against a database.

    • 3

      Type a sentence or two of the song's lyrics into a search engine and click "search." There are many websites that contain lyric databases; when you search for a section of lyrics, these websites will likely come up at the top of the search results. Click on the links to go to these lyric websites to see full information about the song.

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