WhoSampled for iPhone app review

WhoSampled will scan your music collection and introduce you to surprising connections with cover versions, samples and remixes, writes Shane Richmond.

WhoSampled
WhoSampled offers a new way to explore your music.

WhoSampled for iPhone
WhoSampled
£1.99

Your music collection has a secret history. You almost certainly have songs that are cover versions of older songs or that have been covered themselves. Some of the music in your library will be based on samples of other tracks or will have been sampled. Exploring these links can be fascinating and the WhoSampled app makes it extraordinarily easy to do.

Once you've started the app and created an account, WhoSampled will scan your music library and compare it to its vast database. It takes a moment or two, depending on the size of your library, and then you will be able to explore the connections in your music.

The result is enlightening and addictive. Choose an artist or a track and WhoSampled will list songs that have sampled it or in which it has been sampled and will do the same if the song is a cover version or has been covered. Choose, for example, to see where a song has been sampled and WhoSampled will provide a YouTube clip of the song in question and even tell you how many seconds into the track the sample occurs.

You can search for specific tracks, browse charts of the most popular songs and save what you find to a list of favourites for future reference.

The WhoSampled database, which is also available online, conatins 150,000 tracks and is growing at a rate of 1,000 entries per week so most music collections will deliver at least some hits. That's not to say there aren't gaps in the database, particularly with more obscure tracks.

The Venetian Snares track Hajnal, for example, the entry for which is in the picture above, also contains samples of Bartok's first string quartet and Mahler's third symphony, neither of which is in the WhoSampled database.

It would be great to see WhoSampled extended into a Mac app for those whose entire music collection is not on the phone or perhaps somehow extended so that it can scan iTunes Match songs from the cloud. I could also see enormous potential for WhoSampled as a Spotify app.

As it is, it's well-designed, simple to use and essential for any music fan's phone.