Shazam Can Now Identify Music Played Through Headphones

Shazam has gained a new feature allowing it to identify music playing through your headphones. In a nutshell, this means that regardless of the app you’re using, Shazam can identify the song playing through it without actually hearing it.

An Introduction to Shazam

For the uninitiated, Shazam is an app which helps you identify a song whose name escapes you. Say your sitting in a bar and a song you used to like starts playing. You can whip out your phone, let Shazam listen in, and find out the name of the song.

As cool as Shazam is, the app has always had a blind spot. In order to identify music, it would actually have to hear it. Which, if the music was playing on your phone, would mean unplugging your headphones or holding one earpiece against the microphone.

How to Identify a Song While Wearing Headphones

This is no longer the case. With the latest update, Shazam can now identify music played through headphones. This means that if you’re sitting on a bus watching YouTube and hear a song in the background, you won’t need to disturb everyone in order to identify it.

This works across a whole host of different apps. Basically, if you have Shazam installed on your phone, it can hear any music being played in another app. That is once you have enabled the Pop Up Shazam feature in the Settings menu.

This feature is currently only available on Android. Which is ironic given that Apple now owns Shazam, having acquired the company in 2018. However, this feature relies on permissions that iOS currently doesn’t support, handing Android an exclusive.

Download: Shazam for Android | iOS

Is Shazam the Best Music Identification App?

This feature isn’t particularly useful for apps such as Spotify, which display the song currently playing anyway. However, if you hear a song being used in an advert in a podcast, for example, Pop Up Shazam should work a treat. And display the song lyrics as a bonus.

Shazam isn’t the only app capable of identifying songs by hearing them. The major competition being Musixmatch and SoundHound. So we pitched Shazam vs. Musixmatch vs. SoundHound to see which was best. Read the article to find out who won.

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