Deezer's Shazam-like SongCatcher heads to Android, recognizes 53 million songs
SongCatcher, a bit like the Child Catcher but for music
If you are a Deezer user and have an Android phone, SongCatcher is now available to you. It's a Shazam-like service that will reconize a song for you and, if you like it, will automatically add it to your playlists.
The technology is proprietary to Deezer and based around acoustic fingerprinting technology ACRCloud.
Audio recognition has become big business for music platforms. Apple recently bought up Shazam, perhaps the most-famous music discovery platform, for a cool $400 million. The idea being that it will integrate this technology into Siri.
Siri is the heart of Apple HomePod, which has been suffering from lacklustre sales, so it makes sense Apple would be doing what it can to bolster this service.
You can use SongCatcher through the search bar function within the Deezer app, or use a shortcut by selecting 'audio search', while pressing down on the Deezer app.
Going for a song
Deezer had launched a beta version of SongCatcher back in December, but now it's available to all Android users, with Alexander Holland, Chief Content and Product Officer, Deezer, noting: “We’re excited to bring music fans the ability to quickly identify and save their new favorite songs without leaving the app or interrupting their music experience.
"Today we are proud to offer people 53 million tracks on our platform, and SongCatcher makes it possible to find out if the song you are hearing is one of them.”
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There are a few caveats to the service: the 'audio search' functionality is only available for Android users with version 7.1 and above. Freemium users can also use the service, but can only listen to saved songs in shuffle mode.
Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.