Adam Molina / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Now Playing has offered a convenient way to identify songs playing in the background with your Pixel phone.
- Google recently confirmed that Now Playing was adding support for album art, and evidence pointed to the arrival of new default player setting.
- Both these Now Playing changes are currently rolling out to Pixel owners.
Google likes to add value to its Pixel smartphones by building lots of handy little features for them, and one of our favorites has got to be Now Playing. Capable of quickly identifying songs that are playing nearby, it’s great for when you hear something you like and want to know what it is so you can get more. We’ve recently been anticipating a couple major upgrades to Now Playing, and they’re finally starting to arrive.
Our first hint of something new arrived back in November, when we spotted what appeared to be work on bringing album art to Now Playing. Historically, all you’d see next to your history was an icon a music note, instead of a picture of the actual album the song came from. When Google announced the December Pixel Drop earlier this month, it confirmed that Now Playing would be getting album art, just as we anticipated.
Almost immediately after getting that news, we heard about another Now Playing change that also felt imminent, as Google put up a support page describing how it would let you set a default music player app when you wanted to listen to any of those songs in your history.
As of today, Pixel owners appear to be getting access to all this new Now Playing functionality. We’re already seeing the album art, which arrives as part of an “enhance Now Playing” option that also allows your phone to use Google’s cloud resources to identify hard-to-recognize songs — normally, Now Playing works entirely on-device. And indeed, once toggling it on we can see album art for new songs — it doesn’t appear to go back and pull album art for your entire history.
While we haven’t spotted the default player option, the team at 9to5Google report seeing it arrive, so these are both likely part of the same wave of deployment, just being toggled on differently. Be on the lookout for all these Now Playing enhancements coming to your Pixel 6 or later smartphone.
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