Identify What Song Is Playing Right Now

You may go shopping or listen to the radio at home and get struck by a sudden thought: "What's that catchy song?". You may want to add this song to your playlist, but you don't know its name and performer. What to do is not a question anymore.

There are 5 ways to detect tunes you like. Read this article and choose what suits you best.

1. What's that song, Siri?

Siri will come to your assistance whenever you need help to recognize songs. Activate Siri by long-pressing the Power button and asking something like “What’s playing?”. In case you have Hey Siri installed, you don't need to press the buttons, just say “Hey Siri, what’s that song?”.

Siri will shortly respond: "Hang on, let me listen". It will show the name of the song with a link to the Apple Music listing.

Keep in mind that Siri may fail to correctly find out the song if it's noisy around. In this case, try eliminating the noise, turn the volume up on the sound source and move your device closer to it.

2. Let's shazam

Detecting tunes

In 2017, Apple purchased Shazam, a well-known music recognition app, for $400 million.

Shazam allows you to easily find out what song is playing near you. The app creates unique digital fingerprints, matches them with one of the millions of songs in its vast library, and opens an iTunes entry of this song with all the provided details.

Apply the "Auto Shazam" mode to make the app work in the background and remember all songs playing in your location. Long-press the Shazam button to enable this mode.

SoundHound

3. Use music identification apps

Besides Shazam, you can download other decent third-party applications to recognize songs. Pay attention to the hands-free SoundHound app which allows for streaming songs, viewing real-time lyrics and accessing Spotify and Apple Music.

Also, take Songbird into account - it's a Shazam-like app for bird lovers.

4. Tap the button

From now on, there's no need to use third-party apps to identify music. Recently, Apple released an application update for iPads and iPhones that goes with the built-in functionality to identify the tunes playing in the background. Make use of the Music Recognition button in the Control Center if you have iPadOS 14.2 and above or an iPad/iPhone running iOS 14.2.

Bear in mind that it's not a default option. It takes 3 steps to add the button to the Control Center:

Go to Settings and choose Control Center.
Scroll down under More.
Tap the green plus sign next to Music Recognition.

Voila, the button has been added. Then, you can rearrange the Control Center layout by dragging the button up or down. To find an icon, swipe down from the top-right corner of your screen (on iPhones with Face ID) or swipe up from the bottom of the screen (on iPhones with a home button).

Just tap the Shazam logo whenever you want to recognize songs. It works so simply: you just tap to hear a song around you, and your iPad or iPhone applies a microphone to record the track. Then it uploads the audio to the server where it gets analyzed and matched to a corresponding tune in the database. The button will pulse for 10-15 seconds while detecting that tune and you will get notified when the process is over.

5. Whistle with Google

In case a melody is trapped in your head, you can use the Search a song feature and try humming or whistling a tune while using Google.

For that, open the app, tap the microphone in the search field, and press the Search a song button on the listening screen. Then, begin humming and Google will show you similar matches labelled with percentages.

Try different ways to detect tunes that drive you mad and enjoy music to the full.