Baidu adds Shazam-style song-identification to its music app in China

Chinese search giant Baidu has incorporated a search feature into its Baidu Music app that behaves in a similar way to music discovery and tagging service Shazam, allowing users to get song information from just a sound clip.

The feature was added about a month ago to Baidu’s app but only announced today, as spotted by Tech in Asia. The announcement was made by the Baidu-I²R Research Center  — a joint laboratory between Singapore research institute A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research and the Chinese company.

The technology adds another layer to the Baidu Music app by identifying music playing over the air via its audio waveform, and subsequently returns the song title, the name of the artiste, and even the album art. This move would likely eliminate any need for Baidu Music users to download a separate app that has the same features — namely Shazam.

Currently, Baidu Music — which is available only within China — already has several million songs within its database that have received the necessary copyrights, and synchronizes with 17 music lists including Billboard Hits and the UK chart.

➤ Baidu Music | iOS | Google Play

Headline image via Thinkstock

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.