Recently, I covered how to incorporate song recognition to the MacOS menu bar, which helps you stay informed about whatever song is playing. This trick can be extremely useful if you hear a song and can’t identify the artist or title. Now, you can do the same thing on Linux with SongRec. As you might expect, SongRec isn’t as seamless as the MacOS option, but it can still work very well and recognize the music that’s playing. You can use SongRec to identify music that’s playing in the background or to recognize music from a local file. Once it recognizes a song, it will display a notification that includes the artist and title. Additionally, SongRec keeps a history of songs it’s recognized, and you can add songs from your history to favorites and copy the artist, track name, or album to your OS clipboard. If you’re using a distribution that supports Flatpak, you can install SongRec with specific commands. After the installation, you can log out, and then log back in to add SongRec to your desktop menu. Using SongRec is quite simple. All you have to do is open the app while a song is playing, and it will automatically recognize the tune. Once SongRec recognizes the music that’s playing, you can either right-click the listing in Recognition History or click Search on YouTube to see results for the piece. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to manually close the SongRec app, as there is no system tray option. Once closed, the listening system shuts down, and you’re good to go. Congratulations, you’ve just added music recognition to your Linux desktop.
Enhancing Your Linux Desktop: A Guide to Adding Song Recognition
