I remember when I bought my first iPhone I was impressed by the quality of an application called Midomi (now Soundhound) which allowed you to hold you iPhone next to the stereo and, through an internet connection, instantly know which song was playing. To me (and later, to my friends) that was a revolution. God knows how many times we were hanging out somewhere in my town, and heard that song playing in a bar but we couldn’t know what song it was. Midomi was the perfect application to me, it sported a great user interface and definitely helped me discover a lot of new songs. Many other apps came out in the App Store after Midomi, all of them promised to do what Midomi was already doing but they failed. That app was the best.

Up until now Soundhound has done a great job on my iPhone. But just some weeks ago I decided to replace it with another app, MusicID.

If you’ve been browsing the App Store recently you should have noticed this app, which has been charting in the Music category for over a month now, and unlike many of the apps in the App Store’s charts, this one is very good. MusicID lets you search and discover music using the Gracenote database, it’s packed in a beautiful user interface and gets most everything right. The icon is also one thing you want to keep on your home screen first page.

Using MusicID is a simple, yet appealing experience. To identify a song you only have to fire up the application and click on the quite huge Identify Song button in the middle of the screen: the app will start a beautiful animation while listening to the song (for about 5 seconds) and then start querying Gracenote to find out if the sample corresponds to a song in the database. Sounds complicated and techie, it quite is actually, but to your eyes everything will look smooth, fast and “magical”.

Songs take less than 5 seconds to be identified, and after that you’re given this gorgeous shelf-like interface with the name of the song, artist, album and a case as well. There are buttons to see Youtube videos for that song or buy it on iTunes. You can also access the artist’s bio and song’s lyrics directly from this page, assign the song to your current location and find out similar songs. The similar songs option has been indeed a great surprise, as it works good and it has found out some songs I already know and many I had forgotten about.

MusicID doesn’t come with extra - and to me, useless - features like Twitter and Facebook sharing for songs, and I really don’t see who would like to tweet every single song the app discovers. It comes with the basic stuff, like share this song via email and the possibility to keep your previously discovered songs saved for future reference. Or maybe just to see how bad the music was in that bar two weekends ago. As if bad music in bars isn’t enough, try to take a look at the popular section. I warned you.

MusicID is beautiful and does its job just fine without putting tons of extra stuff into it. It’s meant to quickly discover songs, and that’s it. If you add a great looking UI and icon to the mix, you see why I love this app. At $0.99 for a limited time, go download it here.