The power of Windows Phone’s Shazam-like Music Search.

So here I was out shopping at a mall when I heard this song play over a store’s sound system. Now you know some stores simply want to play mood music and some want to play the music so loud that you wonder if it’s a store or a nightclub. For me I was in the latter (it was a Guess? store). I decided that I was going to try out the music search feature of my Windows Phone.

So while the music search worked wonderfully, there were a couple of caveats that keep it from being an awesome experience.

First off, when it finds the correct song you have the option of going to that song in the Zune Marketplace, on the phone, and downloading or purchasing that music. That’s fine, but what if I just want to save that song for later. I don’t necessarily want to hear it at the moment (the store is already playing it) but instead I want to tag that song for later. The Zune HD, with the radio function, was great at this.

Well, there’s a couple of things you can do: One, is to pin the song to the start screen of your phone. The other, if you go back to the Bing search area of the phone and press the “…” symbol, there’s something called music history. It’s there that you’ll find all of the matches that have been made using your phone since the last time you cleared it. Now, if you double-check with the phone that listing will appear as well, so you could end up with 4-5 listings of the same song. Plus, depending upon what point in the music you use the feature, it could come back with right song, different album.

Both methods are great, but this still makes me pine for some sort of ‘add to cart’ feature of Windows Phone. On Zune HD, you could add to cart, sync the device to the PC software and have that music appear in a cart screen. With Windows Phone, you either have to ‘pin to start’ or use the share feature to send yourself a link to the song/album. If you’re like me you don’t want to clutter your phone with all of these downloads of songs you may, potentially, purchase.

However, I must give credit to the song search feature of Windows Phone Mango. It did the job it was supposed to do, and did it brilliantly.

Oh and the song that it found for me? “Mr. Saxobeat” by Alexandra Stan.