Your iPhone has a useful feature you might not know about. You can identify the song that’s playing on the radio at a bar, in your car or at a friend’s house, all without having to open an app. All you have to do is swipe down and tap a single button.
It’s part of the iPhone’s and iPad’s integration with music-recognition service Shazam, which Apple acquired in 2018. It’s been available for a couple of years but might be more useful now that people are out and about again. You don’t even need Shazam installed.
Here’s how to set it up.
- Open Settings on your iPhone.
- Tap Control Center.
- Scroll down under “More” and tap the green ‘+’ button next to Music Recognition.
That adds the music recognition function to Control Center, which you access by swiping down from the top-right of your screen, or from the bottom of the screen if you have an iPhone with a Home button.
How to identify a song from your iPhone
Once you’ve done that, you can use your iPhone to identify a song by swiping down from the top-right of the screen to open Control Center and then tapping the Shazam button. Your phone will listen for a few seconds, then show the artist and title at the top of your screen. And it’ll save a history of the songs you’ve identified so you can go back and see them later. To do that, just press and hold the Shazam button.
That’s it!