iOS 18.2 Music Recognition tells you where you heard a song

Shazam was once so ubiquitous that it was a verb, but since From Apple acquisition and rebranding of the feature as Music Recognition, you don’t even need to have the Shazam app installed anymore.

Apple has continued to improve the feature and from the iOS 18.2 beta, it can now tell you where you were when you heard a song…

Every time you ask your Apple device to identify a number, the number is added to your history so you can remind yourself later. For example, if you hear a new song that you really like, you can revisit it later to view the artist or album on Apple music or Spotify.

Macworld has discovered that the iOS 18.2 Music Recognition feature now has an additional talent: it records where you were when you asked it to identify a song.

With iOS 18.2, the Music Recognition applet can geotag songs based on where users discover them. When a user presses and holds the dedicated Music Recognition Control Center switch and then clicks History a new splash screen will appear for the first time. The page highlights existing features, such as song history and iCloud sync support, and adds a new feature called Musical Memories.

Once you allow location access, a geotagging feature is automatically enabled that tags songs with location data. So in the future, when you discover songs through the Music Recognition tool, your location will be linked to song history so you can place the song in a specific spot to remember where you were when you heard it.

The site notes that this currently only works at the individual song level, and you have to manually tap through the history log to retrieve the data – for example, you can’t open a map of where you’ve requested songs. That could make for a fun future feature, like identifying the coffee shop where you’re introduced to the hottest new music!

I will definitely use it within tango, where I will see which events (and therefore which DJs) introduced me to songs that I have not heard before.

Image: 9to5Mac collage of images from Apple and Yaroslav Poltavskyi on Unsplash