Your iPhone can identify any song with just a tap. Here's how to set it up

Your iPhone can easily identify any song that's playing with just one tap. Here's how to set it up.

Your iPhone can identify any song with just a tap. Here's how to set it up

Taylor Swift

Christopher Polk | Getty Images

Your iPhone has a useful feature you might not know about. You can identify the song that's playing on the radio at a bar, in your car or at a friend's house, all without having to open an app. All you have to do is swipe down and tap a single button.

It's part of the iPhone's and iPad's integration with music-recognition service Shazam, which Apple acquired in 2018. It's been available for a couple of years but might be more useful now that people are out and about again. You don't even need Shazam installed.

Your iPhone can recognize music with just a tap in iOS 14.2.

Todd Haselton | CNBC

Here's how to set it up.

Open Settings on your iPhone.Tap Control Center.Scroll down under "More" and tap the green '+' button next to Music Recognition.

That adds the music recognition function to Control Center, which you access by swiping down from the top-right of your screen, or from the bottom of the screen if you have an iPhone with a Home button.

How to identify a song from your iPhone

Tap this button to identify songs from your iPhone.

Todd Haselton | CNBC

Once you've done that, you can use your iPhone to identify a song by swiping down from the top-right of the screen to open Control Center and then tapping the Shazam button. Your phone will listen for a few seconds, then show the artist and title at the top of your screen. And it'll save a history of the songs you've identified so you can go back and see them later. To do that, just press and hold the Shazam button.

That's it!

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