What do you do if you only remember a small fragment from a song? Search the Web, what else!
What do you do if you only remember a small fragment from a song? Search the Web, what else!There are some people who can remember any fragment from any song in the last few decades. You know the type they usually ensure that their team wins every game of Antakshari ever played. But for the rest of us, well, a little help from the Web will go a long way in enabling us to find out the song we are looking for.
It is hard to be exhaustive here and so we have restricted ourselves to a few sites that we have heard about.
Check them out, and search the Web, there are plenty more out there.
>>English/screentunes.com: This site gives a list of songs. For instance, we typed out 'What Can I Do?' and we got a list of around 15 songs. The best thing is that you have songs from various years, dating all the way back to 1931. It found the one that we were looking for-The Corrs: Live at Lansdowne Road.
>>Hindi/smriti.com: Suppose you want to sing a song that goes 'O Saathire...' and all you know is that Amitabh Bachchan played a role in the film. Just go to this site, select for movies by actor choose Amitabh Bachchan, and you get various songs by him, including this one. The best thing is that you get it in English text, and in Hindi, in both Unicode and GIF formats.
>>Tamil/lyricstamil.com: This site also offers Hindi, English and Telugu lyrics. You have a Google powered search on this site, along with an index of movies. So, if you know that the song 'madurai veeran dhaanae' is featured in Dhool, you can easily choose the options and get there.
>>Kannada/musicmazaa.com/kannada/lyrics/: One thing we missed in this site is the search box, but there is one cool feature-you can get details in a nice rollover popup. For instance, if you keep the mouse pointer over the film 'Hrudayavantha' you get to see a picture of Vishnuvardhan and the list of major actors. The one problem we found was that the songs are stored as JPGs, and quite a few were missing.
Search the WebTypically, you know a few words from a movie, so why not use sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo to search?
This is usually a good idea, but for one thing-how do you spell the words? Since they are not exactly English words, your guess is as good as mine-and neither may agree with what the search engine has indexed.
But this said you can still do a good job. To find out, we searched for the text "therodum veedi yile" (with the double quotes) using all these three search engines to find a song from the Tamil hit Nayagan. While Bing and Yahoo returned zero results, Google automatically suggested results for "therodum veedhiyile".
We also used this second string with the other two search engines. While Yahoo now gave us details of this song, Bing didn't work as expected.
What would we recommend? As things stand today, Google might be better, but the search engine space is constantly changing as companies add more powerful algorithms and additional server clusters to speed up and enhance your search experience. Therefore, the best bet may be to use all three.
