One of the main reasons I use the Pixel 10 Pro XL as my daily driver is the software; while the hardware isn’t quite as good as most other phones, Google does a phenomenal job delivering unique features you don’t get on any other phone. One of those features is Now Playing; the feature lets your Pixel automatically identify music playing in the background, and it continues to be amazing.
What’s particularly great about Now Playing is that it works on-device; it doesn’t need to connect to a cloud server, and you can use it even without an internet connection — all the identification is done locally on your Pixel.
How does Now Playing work?
Now Playing isn’t a new feature; in fact, it made its debut all the way back in 2017 on the Pixel 2 and 2 XL. Google has refined the feature over the years, providing a way to view a history of all identified songs, and making the database smaller in size.
The way Google implemented this feature is pretty clever. Basically, Now Playing relies on a music database that’s stored locally on your Pixel. It uses the mic to listen to ambient sounds, and if it recognizes music playing, it analyzes that audio with the information stored in the database and provides details on the song title and artist either on the lock screen or as a silent notification.
All of this is done near-instantly; the feature just needs to listen to a few seconds of audio to be able to provide a match, and after using it on every single Pixel over the last eight years, it’s eerie how well it works. The best part is that Now Playing does all of this locally — no data is sent to Google, and the feature doesn’t even need an internet connection.
All it does it match the audio playing in your vicinity to the data stored in the local music database. Coming to the database itself, it doesn’t store the entire audio files, and is instead limited to short segments that make it easier to identify popular songs. It stored fingerprints of around 10,000 songs when it came out, but Google continually built up the feature over the course of the last eight years, and it stores a wider selection of music now.
And if you’re worried about Now Playing taking up storage on your Pixel, the entire database comes in at under 500MB. Similarly, battery life isn’t affected unduly, and it takes up less than 1% on average.
How to enable Now Playing
You can set up Now Playing on your Pixel during initial configuration, but if you haven’t done that, it’s easy to enable the feature via the phone’s settings. As the feature needs a local database that’s managed by Google, Now Playing is limited to Pixels.
- Go to Settings.
- Navigate to Sound and vibration.
- Go to Now Playing.
- Toggle Identify songs playing nearby to On.
Google now provides additional utility; if you want album art or come across a song that isn’t in the local database, you can have the feature use Google Search to pull in the data from online sources. I haven’t felt the need to do so, and even with most regional music and older songs, the Pixel 10 Pro XL managed to do a standout job.
