by Matt Bird

Created on: March 06, 2010

Anyone who listens to music has had this conversation with themselves:

'Okay. I don't remember the song title. But I... vaguely... remember the lyrics. Maybe a bit of the chorus. And I remember how it sounds... ba dah bum bah dah... so what's the name? Bah!'

Or something along those lines. And it's admittedly a frustrating experience. When you like a song you want to own it and listen to it at your leisure. With only a snippet in your brain, however, you'll have to do some searching - and unless you have one of those cell phone programs that identifies songs off the radio for you, you'll have to do some research.

The easiest recourse is to head onto the internet, usually Google (though other search engines work fine), and type in the lyrics. Put them between quotation marks to ensure that the search engine looks for those words in exactly that order and hit search. If the string you entered was long enough you'll get the proper response in no time, and can take whatever steps you wish to acquire the song. Piece of cake. To maximize the effectiveness of this method, try to use lyrics from the chorus, as often enough these memorable words are the name of the song in the first place.

You can slo go onto specific sites that will do the searching for you. SongLyrics.com is excellent for this purpose: type in the words you know of the song and it'll give you a list of matching songs, running from the closest match to the furthest. If you managed to learn the lyrics properly you'll have the proper results in no time.

Barring these two methods you can also go the old-fashioned route and ask someone. Have any music-hungry friends, or perhaps avid radio listeners? Ask either and they can usually give you an answer. This method also provides the added benefit of being able to sing a bit of the song to see if they recognize the tune alongside the lyrics.

Regardless of the route you go there's one final step for verifying the song's identity: YouTube. Type the name of the song into YouTube and you'll likely find a video featuring the song. If it's the one you wanted then you've been steered in the right direction; if not, well, you'd best start over from square one. Other video sites will work for this, as well, though none quite match the expansive nature of YouTube.

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