Your phone plays ‘name that tune’

Having trouble naming a tune you’re hearing on the radio or in a club? Whip out your cellphone, dial (866) 411-SONG toll-free and hold the phone close to the speaker for 15 seconds. You’ll get back a text message identifying the song and the artist, plus a link to buy it. Cost: 99 cents. If 411-SONG can’t identify the work, there’s no charge.

The service, available to AT&T;, Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint PCS customers, was created by the Manhattan-based mobile entertainment company MusiKube and launched in April.

“We’ve passed the 50,000-call mark without any form of advertising,” company CEO Sunjay Guleria said Wednesday.

Humming or singing into the phone won’t work.

The way the service works, Guleria said, is through a process called “fingerprinting,” which matches different performers’ versions of the same tune to a database of more than 2.5 million popular recordings.

Although there are also some jazz pieces the service can identify, classical music is definitely out of the mix.

“Classical music is next to impossible to identify correctly simply because you have so many interpretations of the same exact piece,” Guleria explained. “Beethoven’s Fifth has been done countless times. That becomes very challenging.”

Chris Pasles