Shazam is a popular service that is basically a search engine for music and television shows.
You use the app to listen to a portion of a song that is playing or part of a television show and it will look up what that song/program is and give you the details.
Consider it the Bing of music and television.
Recently Shazam updated their app to the new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) for Windows 10 which means they now have a common code base to eventually push this updated app to Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One.
This new UWP of Shazam brings a host of new features:
- Recognise songs and tracks wherever you are. Even offline!
- Buy tracks from Windows Store
- Instantly discover more about the song: get lyrics and see music videos and performances on YouTube
- Share your discoveries to Facebook, Messenger, SMS, Email and more
- Ask Cortana to “Shazam this” and instantly start identifying music around you
Shazam also uses the Live Tiles available in Windows 10 to show you the most recent songs you shazammed and to give you quick access to Shazam itself.
There is also no limit to how much you use Shazam as the service is completely free.
I tried the Cortana integration and it works very well through both voice and typing to access a Shazam search.
Lastly, if I have one knock on this new version of Shazam, it is the fact you can apparently only log into it with a Facebook account. This may be their new model and socially knowing what your Facebook friends are shazamming might be interesting for music discovery but to their credit they did not auto-share my shazams so that is a plus.
