Shazam can now run in the background with Live Activities

AppleInsider

The new Shazam version 17.11 can keep continuously listening for music to identify, and will now display the results via Live Activities on the iPhone.

Shazam shown in the Dynamic Island on an iPhone

Shazam has always been able to identify music by listening to it, although it now listens longer than it used before giving up, and it will also recognize classical music. But unless users stayed in the Shazam app, it had to be launched and re-launched every time it's wanted.

Now with Shazam 17.11, instead of starting and stopping Shazam each time, users can now run it while working in other apps. While it's running, the music-recognition software showing that it is listening using the Dynamic Island.

On recognizing the track, it will then use Live Activities to show notifications of the latest song identified.

Note that it's the iPhone and iPad edition of the app that has been updated. It requires iOS 15.0 or later, or iPadOS 15.0 or later.

Apple Vision Pro runs that iPad version as well, but the Mac edition has not been updated in some years.



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chasm

With all respect to the people behind Shazam, I don’t like this idea (I assume it can be turned off or not made the default behaviour).

Open mics continuously picking up sound could be innocuous, or it could give Shazam’s clients and advertising partners a leg up. I’d want to closely examine their new T&C before implementing that feature.

bonobob

chasm said:

With all respect to the people behind Shazam, I don’t like this idea (I assume it can be turned off or not made the default behaviour).

Open mics continuously picking up sound could be innocuous, or it could give Shazam’s clients and advertising partners a leg up. I’d want to closely examine their new T&C before implementing that feature.

Shazam is owned and operated by Apple.  Same T&C.

applebynature

This is pretty neat, but you still have to launch the app then keep it in the live activities island for as long as you want it running. A feature that androids have is you can set it to run completely invisibly in the background at all times whenever your phone is on. It then silently makes a note of every song that's ever playing around you at all times so that you can go back at any time and look up the name of what was playing at a particular time and place without EVER having to worry about launching the app or wondering if it's running or having it constantly take up space on your island. Now that's pretty cool.

matrix077

applebynature said:

This is pretty neat, but you still have to launch the app then keep it in the live activities island for as long as you want it running. A feature that androids have is you can set it to run completely invisibly in the background at all times whenever your phone is on. It then silently makes a note of every song that's ever playing around you at all times so that you can go back at any time and look up the name of what was playing at a particular time and place without EVER having to worry about launching the app or wondering if it's running or having it constantly take up space on your island. Now that's pretty cool.

App runs silently and invisibly in the background? And you’re thinking that’s a good thing?

No, thanks. If an app can do that a Trojan can surely do as well. 

macgui

chasm said:

With all respect to the people behind Shazam, I don’t like this idea (I assume it can be turned off or not made the default behaviour).

Open mics continuously picking up sound could be innocuous, or it could give Shazam’s clients and advertising partners a leg up. I’d want to closely examine their new T&C before implementing that feature.

I'm good with opening it every time I need it. Saying "Siri name that tune" works fine. Shazam doesn't need to lurk in the background.

Apple should work on improving it. Shazam can identify popular music pretty well, but it's given me problems with jazz and classical. IIRC it used to claim you could hum, sing, or whistle a tune and it would identify it. Obviously there are some variables that would dictate how successful that exercise would be, but I've never seen or heard it work.

Anyway I imagine Apple would allow the Always Lurking feature to be turned off. But Apple being Apple, I wouldn't be surprised if it was an all or nothing feature to be modified when the backlash crescendos. 

Alex and Siri have both started responding to overheard conversation without their respective triggers or anything that sounded similar, as best as I recall. So I'll just say NO to Shazam lurking.