I heard a song being played as Best Week Ever came back from commercial. It was a catchy tune, but I had no idea what the song’s name was or who the artist was. Technology to the rescue!

First, I rewound the episode a bit, since I was watching it on the DVR. I fired up the free Shazam application on my wifi-connected iPhone so that it could sample the music. A 30-second sample showed this result:

The artist’s name is actually misspelled there. There is no space between the two Honeys, and they are all lowercase. I grabbed my Zune and searched the Zune Marketplace (via my home’s wifi network) for honeyhoney. This is what it found:

I selected the Loose Boots album and played Little Toy Gun from there:

I was able to stream the track directly from the Zune Marketplace (ZMP) because I pay for their $14.99/month Zune Pass. This gives me access to most of the ZMP’s music (tracks that are marked as Album Only cannot be accessed using the Zune Pass). After verifying that I had the right song, I added it to the cart, which allowed me to download it to the Zune. Later on, when I sync to my PC, the song would transfer to the collection on my PC.

While I’m away from home, the Shazam app works just fine since I usually have at least an EDGE connection. However, the Zune is limited to wifi, so I couldn’t download anything from the ZMP until I returned home. This makes me hope that a Zune app will find its way to Windows Mobile.

On a related note, the Zune team is now giving 10 free downloads a month to Zune Pass subscribers. So if I really like Little Toy Gun, I can permanently add it to my collection. It should be available as a 320kbps MP3 or a 192kbps WMA (the latter is still DRMed, but I believe I can just burn it to a CD and then rip that CD to get it as an MP3).

Thanks to Jordan, I learned about imeem. Using their service, I can embed the tune that caught my attention and prompted me to write this post about how I use these two mortal enemies together.