For Shazam lovers out there, however magical Shazam may be, there is a bigger, badder, and a whole lot more expensive competitor in its game of musical guessing.

Developer Melodis introduces Midomi Ultra, a music identifying iPhone app that uses its own Sound2Sound Search Science to identify a “flexible fingerprint” of your music search with a match in its database of millions of recorded music. Much like Shazam, Midomi’s technology gives super quick and accurate results, all within a time limit of no more than 30 seconds. Midomi sure gives Shazam a run for its money – or maybe not with Midomi’s ultra price of $4.99.

You may weigh the options here simply based on price, or whether you prefer Shazam’s blue palette over Midomi’s orange, but where Midomi truly shines and sets itself apart is its ability to recognize the spoken voice. For all those frustrated souls who have a tune spinning round their primary auditory cortex they simply can’t identify, then hum or sing it aloud to Midomi, and it will decipher any key or rhythm to match the melody with its user recordings on Midomi.com. Midomi’s technology also uses “a compact, flexible representation of your voice that can be instantly matched against phonetic versions of song and artist’s names.” In other words, Midomi understands pronunciation, loud and clear.

To use Midomi, simply tap the orange button in the center of the screen – the one that queries “What’s that song” along with Midomi’s musical note and sound wave logo – and hold your iPhone close to the speaker playing the music in question. A circle will show up on the screen, slowly filling up as it identifies the song, and then Midomi will show a screen with your results. So far, all of my results have been pitch-perfect. For best results when singing or humming, only one person should sing or hum at a time, with no background music. The app says to sing for at least ten seconds, for the sound recognition software to better work, and then tap the orange button again when finished. Midomi, unfortunately, is not able to identify live ensemble performances, which may be a bummer to many people who record live music and then cannot place it later on, but it’s nice to know Midomi can identify your rapping into the iPhone speaker, so long as there is a detectable melody. Only occasionally will Midomi not have the song you seek, and in that case you may log on to midomi.com and request a song to be entered in the database. Of course, this isn’t to say you should inundate Midomi with requests to input your local, unknown band’s music (sorry, Parade Route).

What if you just want to search for the name of a song or artist without a song to identify? Tap one of the two gray search boxes below the big orange one. The one on the left allows you to say the artist name, song, or album for voice searching, while the one of the right simply has you type it in.

Once Midomi identifies a song for you – Midomi was able to identify my heavily butchered rendition of “Fallin” by Alicia Keys, which goes without saying is incredibly difficult to sing – click on the appropriate selection in the results menu to take you to that song’s page. It will show an image of the album from which the song hails, a 30 second clip of music from the album, a thumbnail for YouTube videos that allows you to watch them instantly through Midomi, and further down the screen there are even options to search for lyrics, reviews or artist discography. Should you truly love the song, feel free to tap the iTunes icon to purchase it directly through iTunes. Otherwise, simply bookmark the page to view it later under your history screen. You may also share any information saved on Midomi through email, Facebook, or Twitter, by tapping on the “Share” button.

I was particularly amused at how you can view user recordings of any song you search for. After I belted out my own screechy version of “Fallin,” I saw at the bottom of the results screen a collection of user recordings for this song. Clicking on one labeled “—BOB—“ with an image of a cute blonde girl donning an In N Out burger cap and biting her nail suggestively, I was able to hear her entire rendition of the song – to say the least, she was far better suited to those high-ranging vocals than I (I commend you, she of the In N Out Burger clan).

If you feel like pulling the extra cash for Midomi Ultra, I say it’s well worth the price since most of the time I can’t place a tune in my head rather than on the radio. Also, I’ve noticed I’m normally driving when listening to the radio, and positioning the iPhone close to the radio speaker can be pretty awkward, at least more awkward than simply speaking into it. So, if you are more likely to belt out a tune instead of figuring out one of the radio, then the voice recognition software enabled in the Sound2Sound Search Science really makes buying Midomi worth it.