Do you use the Shazam app on your Phone? Or the very similar Sound Hound app? These apps can identify the music that is playing in your environment. The technology behind them is pretty amazing. Even in a loud room they can ID the music playing and provide you with artist name, track name, album art and more. In the most recent release of macOS (12.0) and iOS (15.0) Apple provides the Shazam system built into the OS. Siri can be used to access Shazam and ID music. Pretty cool. But also, developers can now use the technology in their app. Why would FrogRadio need to use such a thing when most radio stations send along the track info with the music stream? Well, there are some stations that do not send the info. It's alway been frustrating when you hear a song and want to know more about it but the station does not send it. Shazam to the rescue! FrogRadio can now ID music tracks from these stations. If you want to try it go to KEXP or WCNI. (You need to have FrogRadio installed for those links to work.)

A couple of notes: the Shazam system is pretty solid. It gets the track correct almost all the time. One exception is ambient music. Many ambient tracks can have sections that sound like other tracks, so occasionally the wrong track name and album art will be shown. For most other music genres it gets it right all the time. Another note: FrogRadio is not using the microphone on your Mac to listen to the music. Instead it collects samples of the music directly from the stream as they are played over your speaker or headphones.

[Update - 08/11/22]

KEXP now sends track/artist info! Yeah, it's about time.