How-To

How to Use Shazam with Apple Music Classical

By Adam Davidson

Published May 31, 2023

Have you heard a piece of classical music you love but have no idea what it is? Learn how to use Shazam with Apple Music Classical in this guide.

Apple Music is a great app for popular music, but it isn’t ideal for classical lovers. That’s why Apple introduced the Apple Music Classical app, focusing purely on classical music. If you’re a classical music fan, this app can help you to find and listen to your favorite classical music, and even give you different recordings of the same pieces by different soloists or conductors.

What do you do if you don’t know the name of the piece of classical music that you want to listen to, however? Well, thanks to an integration between the two apps, you can now use Shazam to identify pieces of classical music. You can then open that music directly in the Apple Music Classical app.

If you’re ready to identify that haunting cello piece you’ve heard in a movie, then you’ll want to learn how to use Shazam with Apple Music Classical below.

What is Shazam?

Shazam is a smartphone app that listens to a piece of music and identifies it using its song recognition technology. Imagine that a song comes on the radio, and you really want to know what it is. Just open Shazam, tap it to make it start listening, and it will analyze the audio picked up by your smartphone microphone, and attempt to identify the piece of music it can hear.

The results are usually impressively accurate, and impressively fast.

Shazam started out life as an independent app but in 2018 Apple acquired Shazam for around $400 million. It’s now an ad-free app that fully integrates with iOS, meaning you can even Shazam a song just by asking Siri what’s playing.

You can also sync any songs you Shazam to a ‘My Shazam Tracks’ playlist in Apple Music, and quickly add songs that Shazam has recognized to your Apple Music playlists. And if you prefer Spotify, you can opt to connect Shazam to Spotify too, although if you want to do so, you’ll need to disconnect it from Apple Music.

Shazam has now been linked with the new Apple Music Classical app, allowing you to Shazam classical music and open the results directly within the Apple Music Classical app.

How to Identify a Track with Shazam

Identifying a piece of classical music with Shazam is simple to do. You can get Shazam to start listening from within the Shazam app, type the name of a piece of music directly into the app, or just ask Siri to identify the music that’s playing.

To identify a track in Shazam:

1. Launch the Shazam app.
2. Ensure that the music you want to identify is playing.
3. Tap the Shazam logo to start the app listening.
   
4. When Shazam has recognized the track, you will see details of the track that Shazam believes it has heard.
   
5. You can also press and hold the Shazam logo to start Auto Shazam. This feature will listen continually whilst you leave your phone alone or use other apps.
   
6. When you’re done, return to the app and tap the Shazam logo again to stop the app from listening.
7. Under Recent Shazams, you’ll see the Auto Shazam you just created.
   
8. Tap it to see a list of the songs that Shazam was able to recognize.
   
9. You can also use Siri to start Shazam. When music is playing, simply say “Hey Siri, what’s playing?” and Shazam will start listening.
   
10. You’ll see the result appear on your screen, and Siri will also speak the name of the recognized track out loud.
    
11. If you tap the Siri result, you’ll be taken to the track in the Shazam app.
12. If you don’t have the song to hand, but you know the name of it, you can also enter this into Shazam by scrolling down to access the My Music section and tapping the Search icon.
    
13. Enter the name of the piece you want to find.
    
14. Tap on one of the suggested results.
    
15. Choose from the list by tapping one of the results.
    
16. The piece will now open in the Shazam app.

How to Open the Track in Apple Music Classical

Once you’ve used Shazam to identify a track, you can open it directly in the Apple Music Classical app. This option will not appear if the piece Shazam recognizes isn’t found within the Apple Music Classical app.

To open a Shazam result in Apple Music Classical:

1. Identify the track using the steps above.
2. You can also open a previously recognized track by selecting it from your Recent Shazams in the My Music section.
   
3. When you’ve opened the track, tap the Three Dots icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
   
4. Select Open in Classical. If this option does not appear, then the song is not part of the Apple Music Classical catalog.
   
5. The track will now open in Apple Music Classical. You can add it to your library, and play the song directly within the Apple Music Classical app.
   

How Good is Shazam at Identifying Classical Music?

Unfortunately, if you’re hoping to identify the more obscure pieces of classical music that you’ve always wanted to know the names of, Shazam may not be able to help. The app works by creating an audio fingerprint for the music that it hears through your microphone, and then comparing that fingerprint to the tracks in its database. This works brilliantly for popular music, which usually has a repeating verse and chorus structure that makes matching a fingerprint incredibly fast.

However, with the more complex structure of many pieces of classical music, these fingerprints may be harder to match. When we tested out Shazam with some classical music, the results were mixed, to say the least. It took about seven tries for Shazam to recognize Elgar’s Cello Concerto, but when it did finally manage it, it returned the exact recording by the exact cellist and conductor, which is pretty impressive.

However, even a highly recognizable piece such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony took many tries before it was recognized correctly, and it failed to recognize Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at all. It does seem to be the case that playing a more recognizable section of a piece of classical music yields better results, but even this doesn’t always help.

When it works, the ability to immediately access the song in the Apple Music Classical app and add it to your library is very useful, and a welcome new feature in the Shazam app. Ultimately, however, the process was usually more frustrating than useful.

Get More Out of Apple Music

Learning how to use Shazam with Apple Music Classical allows you to quickly add songs to your Apple Music Classical library, provided you can get Shazam to recognize the music in the first place. Shazam is an incredibly useful app when it comes to popular music, but unfortunately, it still finds classical music more troublesome.

There are plenty of other ways you can do more with your Apple Music subscription. If you miss the collaborative playlists that you can create on Spotify, you can learn how to make a collaborative playlist on Apple Music, although this does require the use of a third-party app.

If you don’t want the world to know about the shameful tunes in your ‘guilty pleasures’ playlist, you can also learn how to keep your Apple Music profile and listening history private.