YouTube Working on New Song Recognizing Feature; Will Let You Search Song on Humming

HIGHLIGHTS

• A tool that will assist you in finding the music you can't stop thinking about is being developed by YouTube.
• Similar to Shazam, this tool requires you to hum or play a song in order to identify it.
• However, it's presently only available to a small number of Android users for testing.

YouTube frequently beta-tests new features with a restricted group of users before making them available to everyone. The one that is being tested right now is Shazam-like music recognition through humming or recording. Only a small number of Android YouTube users currently have access to this function.

YouTube Humming Song Recognition feature

• YouTube shared a message on its support page about its latest experiments. One of them is more ways for people to search for songs on YouTube.
• You can do this either by humming a song (which probably won't work most of the time) or by recording a song that is currently playing for more than three seconds.
• When YouTube detects a song, it shares that official music content as well as user-generated videos or shorts that used the same song.

If you are an Android user, you can check if you have this feature by turning on the audio search button to use the new song search feature. As mentioned above, this feature is currently in testing, so it is only available to select Android users. It is not known when YouTube will release a stable version of this feature. But since it would be very useful for users, there should be no reason for YouTube not to publish it. YouTube currently has around 2.7 billion users worldwide.

However, this feature is not new as it is already available in apps like SoundHound and Shazam. On the iPhone, it has been integrated since Apple bought Shazam, and you also have the option of opening songs directly in Apple Music. It is not clear if the same is available on YouTube Music.

How soon can we see this feature on our devices?

Interestingly, this latest YouTube experiment may sound familiar to certain users. In 2020, YouTube’s parent company Google initially announced the feature in the Google app, the Google Search widget, and the Google Assistant. It allows users to end songs by humming, whistling or using a loud microphone icon.

The notable difference, however, is that Google's offering requires 10-15 seconds of buzzing to find a song? As Google previously explained, its feature uses machine learning models to match human hums with a distinct "fingerprint" or signature melody of a song.

Other features being tested on YouTube are actually redesigns that make it harder to skip ads. The redesign makes the ad button transparent, smaller and with rounded edges. So you might just miss it or you might struggle to find it on YouTube.