Knowing the name of a movie can become an obsession. The same happens with the name of an actor, the series they appeared in, or even worse, the name of the song that played in one of its episodes. If we add clips from TikTok and Instagram that use music from everywhere, it is essential to have a tool that lets us quickly find out the name of the song , and that's where Shazam steps in, now available as an extension for Google Chrome and other flavors of Chromium.
Shazam's origins date back to 1999, but its history as a service began in 2002, available only in the UK (basically, you had to make a phone call to identify a song). The smartphone era made Shazam an iPhone app in 2008, with its Android counterpart arriving later that year. Fast forward to December 2017, and Shazam's enormous popularity caught Apple's attention, which ended up paying $400 million for the platform in September 2018.
Today, both Siri and the rest of the assistants do a good job at finding the name of a song (making Shazam unnecessary), but desktop systems always lag a step behind. The most effective way to know the name of a song playing in the browser is with the help of an extension, and although we have previously talked about AHA Music, the truth is that Shazam joined the Chrome Store, and today we decided to test it.
Shazam in Chrome: Finding the Name of That Song That Drives You Crazy
Obviously, there's nothing to configure beyond installing the extension itself (Shazam has no dependencies and doesn't require a user account). Play music in a tab, click the Shazam logo to open its interface, and click the button to 'Shazam' and let the algorithms do their magic. The process isn't instantaneous, and you'll likely have to wait two or three seconds, but overall it works very well.
Why 'generally'? Because Shazam has better accuracy at detecting mainstream music, especially if it's available in the Apple ecosystem. With each positive result, the Shazam extension will enable a small preview of the song, and provide a link to listen to it fully on Apple Music. However, during my testing session, Shazam not only failed to detect certain songs but also made several mistakes, suggesting completely different tracks.
The version of Shazam for Chrome is 0.1.3, and I imagine it has a lot of optimization work ahead, but I still recommend downloading a copy. If you need to know the name of the song playing in your browser , it's very likely that a simple click on its icon will get you out of trouble, even if you encounter an occasional error.
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