iOS 18.2 Music Recognition will tell you where you heard a song

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

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

Whenever you ask your Apple device to identify a song, it adds the track to your history, so that you can remind yourself later. If you heard a new song you really like, for example, you can revisit it later in order to check out 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 logs where you were when you asked it to identify a song.

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

Once you allow location access, it will automatically enable a geotagging feature that will tag songs with location data. So, going forward, when you discover songs through the Music Recognition tool, it’ll attach your location to the song history so you’ll be able to place the song in a specific place to remember where you were when you heard it.

The site notes that this currently only works at an individual song level, and you have to manually tap through the history log to retrieve the data – you can’t, for example, pull up a map of where you queried songs. That might make for a cool future feature, like identifying the coffee shop that introduces you to the most new music!

I’ll use it within tango for sure, checking out which events (and hence which DJs) introduced me to songs I haven’t heard before.

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