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Android Jelly Bean comes with a Google widget that lets you find the name of a song you're listening to. Just like Shazam or SoundHound, except that the widget links to Google Play, so you can quickly buy the song if you're in the US.


The widget's name is Sound Search, but the most prominent message you're likely to see when using the widget is "What's this song?". The internal codename for the app seems to be "Google Ears".

Here's the Sound Search widget in action:


Hopefully, Google will release Sound Search as a standalone app or integrate it with Google Play Music and the Voice Search app.

If you frequently watch music videos or listen to music on YouTube and you also use Last.fm, there's a Chrome extension that scrobbles these songs. The official Last.fm client supports players like iTunes and Windows Media Player, but YouTube is probably the largest online repository of free music and it can be used as a music player.

The Last.fm Scrobbler for Chrome detects the category of the video you're watching and tries to find the artist and the song title, then it sends this information to Last.fm. The first time when it scrobbles a song you'll see a Last.fm page that requests your permission.

The extension shows notifications when the track changes and it supports many other sites: Google Music, Pandora, MySpace, Google+ (the YouTube widget) and more. At the moment, you can't scrobble tracks in Google Music because Google changed the URL, but an update should fix this issue.


{ via Matthew }