Years ago, there was this song that would come on over the loudspeakers nearly every time I worked out at the gym. I still don't know its title, let alone the performer or what album it was on. How cool would it have been if all I needed to do was take out my cell phone and have it automatically identify the track name and artist for me?

Although technology that does this very thing has been available to some (see here and here) already, a new hack called Listen, developed by tuaw contributor Erica Sadun, promises bring song identification to the iPhone. Very much in beta, the software samples 5 seconds of music before trying to contact a song ID server remotely to come up with title, artist and album information. Comments on Sadun's Web site regarding Listen have been generally positive thus far. Click here to give it a try.


(image from tuaw)

Keep in mind, you'll need to jailbreak your iPhone to run third-party applications before running this or other hacks. The iPhone won't be capable of officially supporting native applications—software that runs directly on the iPhone and not from a remote server in the smartphone's Safari Web browser—until after Apple releases a software development kit for developers next month.