Photo credit: Shazam
A new Shazam update enables music recognition detection for songs played by other apps.
“You can now identify songs in apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube,” reads the Shazam App Store description following an update on Thursday, July 6. While the feature isn’t quite as seamless as one would hope, here’s how to enable the new feature.
How to use Shazam in social media apps
- Open an app like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube and look for a video with music in the background.
- Open the Shazam app.
- Press the Shazam button.
- Switch back to the social media app – Shazam is listening.
- Once there is a result, the music recognition app will ping you.
Don’t want to enable the feature every time? You can set up automatic Shazam so you get a notification every time you listen to music.
- Open the Shazam app.
- Press and hold the Shazam button.
- The message “Auto Shazam is enabled” appears.
- Now when you scroll social media, you can identify songs.
Shazam saves the auto-identified songs to your library for you to check out later. It’s not dissimilar to Google’s Now Playing service for its Pixel phones – although that doesn’t work with social media just yet. If you’re tired of constantly identifying songs while scrolling through your feed, you can do the same process all over again to turn it off. Be careful about leaving Shazam running in the background too much, though, because having to recognize all the music you’re listening to can drain your battery.
Ever since Apple bought Shazam, it’s been a huge hit for the Cupertino giant. More than a billion songs have been reached with the music recognition function of Control Center in iOS. It also processed more than a billion song matches per month, an impressive number given that the service is available for both iOS and Android – but with deeper integration on iOS.