Many of us have encountered the situation where a familiar song plays, but its title or artist remains a mystery. Fortunately, there are alternatives like the well-known Shazam app that can help us identify these tunes.
Shazam has been a reliable companion for years, allowing us to recognize songs playing in real time, typically from our mobile devices. However, now YouTube, the popular video streaming platform, is stepping into the game. While YouTube is primarily known for videos, it’s also a common platform for music consumption, offering a vast array of content across genres, all readily available and free of charge.
Google is now testing a new feature for YouTube, specifically designed to address these music-related tasks. Despite YouTube’s robust search engine, finding a song without knowing its title or artist can be challenging.
The good news is that Google is developing a feature that will enable us to identify music tracks directly on YouTube by simply humming the tune. This experimental feature is being rolled out to select users of the Android mobile application for YouTube and is gradually expanding. In essence, this function will directly compete with the popular Shazam app.
How the new YouTube experiment to find songs works
As mentioned earlier, this new feature allows you to identify a song on the streaming platform simply by humming it. Google claims that this feature can recognize musical tracks in just 3 seconds. But that’s not all; once the identification is complete, YouTube will also suggest similar music tracks from its extensive library.
The search results will include official music videos as well as short videos that use the identified music. Furthermore, YouTube is taking it a step further by allowing you to identify music from your own recordings. For example, if you record a song with your mobile device or if it’s playing in your vicinity, YouTube will still be able to identify it.
While a similar functionality exists through Google’s assistant, the key difference here is that you can perform this music identification directly within the widely-used YouTube application.