Key Takeaways
- YouTube Music now has a song identification feature that can recognize tunes you hum or whistle.
- The update for Android allows users to sing, hum, or whistle into the app to find a song.
- According to reports, YouTube Music is better at identifying songs than Shazam.
There have been plenty of apps in the past to help people identify a song that they remember the tune to, but not the title of. Shazam has been around for years now, and while it does the job well, nobody has really risen to the challenge to compete with it. Now, YouTube is finally stepping into the arena with its own Music service, which can now identify what song you’re humming or whistling along to via the Android app.
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As reported by The VergeYouTube is rolling out an update for its Music app on Android. You can tell you have the update if you tap on the Search button in the app, and then look near the microphone icon. If you see a waveform icon next to it, you’ve got the update.
When you tap this icon, YouTube Music begins listening through your microphone. This is your cue to sing along to the tune you’re thinking of. If you can’t remember the lyrics, you can instead opt to hum, whistle, or go “doo dee doo” instead. YouTube Music will then scour its database for a match to your melodic mumblings and report back with what it thought you were singing.
In the testing that The Verge performed, it found that YouTube Music had a pretty great track record of correctly identifying songs – at least, it was reportedly better than Shazam. Without getting our hands on it, we can’t say for sure how well YouTube Music can identify non-mainstream music, such as video game soundtracks and indie tunes. If you’re lucky enough to have the update on your device, give it a shot and see if it can identify that one earworm that has been plaguing you for years now.