Quotes of the Day

Last week I went dancing in a nightclub, and I heard a tune that sent me into a state of bliss. But the euphoria ended when I tried to locate the song on iTunes the next day, because all I could remember was the bass line. Thankfully, Sony Ericsson is ending that frustration with two new Walkman phones that enable on-the-spot music identification. With Track ID, a technology powered by a company called Gracenote, the W850i and W950i phones can capture a song fragment wherever you hear it, and send it to Gracenote's Mobile Music ID (MMID) database for identification. In seconds the title and artist are sent to your phone display. Simon Hossell, European sales director of Gracenote, the company that codes and sorts music on Apple's iPod and most MP3 players, says the technology performs with better than 90% accuracy on a 3- to 5-second sample. "I have been in a bar that was so noisy all I could detect was a guitar chord — and that was enough," he says. Gracenote's MMID database includes more than 10 million musical fingerprints, and Track ID works at any point in the song. Now if only my Track ID-enabled phone could identify the acquaintance whose name slipped my mind at the nightclub, it would be the ultimate in tech gadgets. The W850i is available at the online stores of many mobile-network operators. For the W950i, visit www.sonyericsson.com.

• Brooke Carnot
• Got an unknown song stuck in your head? A new mobile service can dig it up for you