Amazon Appstore's free app of the day, 3/30/2011: Soundhound Infinity

Amazon.com has promised a free app every day in the Amazon Appstore, and today's app is Soundhound Infinity, a sound recognition app. There is a free version, as well, but the Infinity version has a widget you can put on your home screen for one-click access to the music recognition feature of the app.

[Users need to remember that at least for now, at the time of this writing, if you move the app to SD, widgets for that app will not work. This is a platform limitation.]

The free app on the launch day of the Amazon Appstore was Angry Birds Rio, which is exclusive to the Amazon Appstore for now, and which remains free for a unspecified limited time. It will carry a $0.99 price when that time passes.

Soundhound Infinity is $4.99 in both the Android Market, and normally is priced the same in the Amazon Appstore (as noted previously, the two marketplaces sometimes have differing prices).

It is described as follows:

SoundHound Infinity is instant music search and discovery, with the world's fastest music recognition. It is the ultimate music app, ad-free with unlimited usage and premium features.

Say it, tag it, sing it, hum it, or type it -- SoundHound Infinity offers every gateway of music search. Boasting the world's fastest music recognition, the world's only sing and hum recognition, and voice-directed search, it lets users find and explore music faster than ever before with rich content including cover art, videos, lyrics, song previews, recommendations, tour dates, and more, all with one tap access.

View lyrics, search for videos, or buy the MP3
SoundHound Infinity's Android home screen widget, included only in the paid version, allows you to put the SoundHound widget on your homescreen, giving you immediate, one-tap launching of the music recognition feature. A heavily requested feature by Android device users, the SoundHound widget is the fastest way to ID a song. Even if the song is about to end, you may still capture it!

Key Features

• Blazing fast music recognition: name tunes playing from a speaker in as little as 4 seconds
• The world's only viable singing and humming recognition
• Voice recognition music search: just speak a title or band name to check it out
• Lookup song lyrics
• Song previews allow you to listen and sample tops hits and new discoveries
• Buy link for instant music downloads, including Amazon MP3
• Song mapping allows you to see where you discovered your songs on a map, and can be viewed later in your History
• Social sharing: it's fast and easy to share your song IDs via Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and e-mail
• Optimized for both phones and tablets, including Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab

Soundhound Infinity has 9,093 ratings for a 4.5 average out of 5 in the Android Market. In the Amazon Appstore, it has 30 reviews, and is in the 4.5-star range.

That's a change from the normal Amazon Appstore critics: most of the apps that have been "set free" were much more critically judged in the Amazon Appstore than in the Android Market. In fact, Monday's Farm Frenzy was removed in favor of Newsweek Mobile after a furor over app permissions.

The Amazon Appstore requires sideloading, which means that for now AT&T devices can't use it. As we noted before, however, there is a way to at least "reserve" these free apps for installation later, when AT&T corrects the issue, as it has promised.

Amazon opened up the Appstore despite a lawsuit by Apple, which has previously trademarked the term "App Store." Microsoft has filed an appeal against that trademark, saying the term is too generic.