‘Now Playing’ Adds Passive Music Recognition from Pixels to Your Phone

The Now Playing function on the Pixel detects music automatically. The key benefit of Now Playing is that the phone will detect any ambient music that is playing. The information will be shown on the phone's lock screen.

Pixel Smartphones, 'Now Playing'

Kieron Quinn, a skilled developer, created Ambient Music Mod, which allows users to detect and identify music using their phones passively.

The procedures for recording, data sharing and matching are similar to those for Now Playing. However, as Quinn describes in his Medium article, he chose to forego ambient music recognition, which would have required a lot of finagling, in favor of a model that relies on a number of triggers such as the device's display going on and predefined record events and durations. It's a little more random in style, but the process seems to operate similarly: Now Playing accurately identified every song played during five hours of radio, whereas AMM successfully identified all but one.

Quinn eliminated the requirement for root access altogether for Android 12 and later devices with the release of version 2.0 last week — the package consists of the Ambient Music Mod app itself and a stripped-down, independent version of the Android System Intelligence that handles the Now Playing service. Other built-in features include notification album graphics, a historical log of recognized songs, a dedicated mode for manually-triggered recognition attempts, and the opportunity to adjust record timings.

You may try out Ambient Music Mod by downloading and installing the most recent version from Quinn's GitHub source.