Google could add album art to ‘Now Playing’ on Pixel phones

Google may upgrade the “Now Playing” feature by adding the much-needed album art to the history page. Now Playing has been able to identify songs with a high degree of accuracy, but the list only included the name of the song and the artist.

Now Playing is constantly operating in the background, but only for music

Introduced way back in 2017 along with the Pixel 2, the Now Playing feature has remained exclusive to the Google Pixel phones. It essentially identifies songs that are playing nearby and works well even on the latest Pixel 9 devices.

Apps like Shazam have been recognizing music and songs for quite some time. However, Now Playing has some tricks for the Pixel phones. Now Playing works entirely in the background. Pixel users don’t even need to pull out their phones.

While working in the background, Now Playing relies on the low-power efficiency cores to continuously analyze audio through the microphone. If it picks up audio that seems like music or a song, Now Playing requests the performance cores to record a few seconds of the audio.

Now Playing then matches the recorded audio on a database containing tens of thousands of fingerprints of the most popular songs in a particular region. After processing and matching, Now Playing displays the name and artist of the song on the lock screen as well as in a notification.

Needless to say, Now Playing is fairly accurate. However, the list of songs it recognizes contains only the name of the song, the artist, and a timestamp.

Google’s Now Playing feature for Pixel devices may get album art

The songs that Now Playing recognized are visible under Settings > Sound & vibration > Now Playing. The page lists the history of identified songs in reverse chronological order.

Although there’s an icon next to each song, Google has refused to append any album art to the songs Now Playing recognizes. According to Android Authority, this might change in the future.

The hidden system app that downloads the Now Playing database may soon also grab album art. The code change is titled “#AlbumArt Add Now Playing album art downloads to the network usage log”.

Google has yet to assign a dedicated online repository from where Now Playing will download album art for the songs it recognizes. However, Ambient Music Mod, an open-source port of Now Playing by developer Kieron Quinn, already has the feature. The reverse-engineered version essentially replaces the generic music note icon with album art.