As a music-search tool, songs can be found by singing, humming, or whistling into a computer-connected microphone; the system then compares your recording to others and makes its best educated guess as to what you're searching for.

Genres are extensive, ranging from Billboard standards to christian/gospel, music for children, and spoken word. Results are shown not only as the original rendition but versions sung by other users, complete with social-networking-style profiles and performance ratings. If you're not quite sure what to search for, singing suggestions are available by genre with thumbnail images of CD covers to identify the original song.

Midomi reports having over two million legal music tracks available to purchase for the industry-standard price of $.99 a track, playable on Windows media players. While the site does run on Macs, it's compatible only with OS 10.3.9 and higher.

Design-wise, the site hardly has a presence, especially when compared with the fresh, sleek design of its closest competitor SingShot (also in beta). Midomi shares the same Halloween-orange primary color as its other close competitor, KSolo.com (again, in beta)—although, to its credit, Midomi doesn't cross the design-ugly line as KSolo does. The predominant feature of the Midomi wordmark is an eighth-note built into the "d" and echoed in white at the top of the splash page to match in music-note notation the Midomi name, which literally means the music notes E, C, E. ("Do Re Mi" are the first three notes of a C scale in solfege, which uses syllables to teach scales.)

The Sunnyvale, California-based company was started by two Stanford Ph.D. engineers, Keyvan Mohajer and Majid Emami, with millions raised from investors including Global Catalyst Partners, Amidzad, and Aydin Senkut (formerly of Google).

Mohajer and Emami also created a parent company, called Melodis, with aspirations to move into other related business areas. Next up may be speech recognition.