I’ve enjoyed Shazam on my iPhone for years. Shazam is an iOS app that allows you to identify/tag music (and now TV shows) that is playing around you. You hear a song playing on the radio, in a restaurant, at an event, etc, and you say yourself “I like that song. I wonder what’s it called?” Just fire up Shazam and within a few seconds the name of the song will pop up on the screen with the artist info and even a link to go buy it on the iTunes store if it’s available. I love it.

Just the other day I opened up the Mac App Store app and Shazam was featured there as a Mac app. I thought, hmm why would I need it on my Mac? However, I downloaded it and I really do find it useful. Unlike Shazam on my iPhone, Shazam on my MacBook Pro runs in the background and is always listening. As soon as something plays that nearby that it can identify it pops up a notification from Notification Center to quickly show the song or TV show info. If you miss the notification or if you later want to see what songs were playing you can just click to drop down the Shazam menu on the menu bar. This is even more useful on a Mac notebook because chances are you’ll be using it outside your home and your music library. Since Shazam is free I can’t really seen any reason not to have it. I can always turn off the listening if I find the popups distracting, but it’s really cool when I’m listening to Pandora Radio to have a list of all that played during a particular session even as I jump from station to station.

I’m building a “Road Trip” playlist and this App has really come in handy to remind me of songs to add to the playlist!

You can get Shazam for Mac here:

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You can get Shazam for iOS here:

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