Just as promised, Pixel phones are getting enhanced Now Playing

Google likes to add value to its Pixel smartphones by building them into lots of handy little features, and one of our favorites is Now playing. Its ability to quickly identify songs playing nearby is useful when you hear a song you like and want to know what it is so you can get more of it. We’ve been anticipating several big upgrades to Now Playing lately, and they’re finally starting to arrive.

We first received new news back in November, when we discovered that the album cover seemed to be being brought to Now Playing. Historically, all you saw next to the history was just a note icon rather than a picture of the actual album the song came from. When Google announced December Pixel Drop Earlier this month, it was confirmed that “Now Playing” will get an album cover, as we expected.

Almost immediately after getting the news, we heard about another Now Playing change, which also feels imminent, as Google set up a support page describing how it lets you set one up Default music player Use the app when you want to listen to any song from your history.

As of today, it looks like all of these new Now Playing features are available to Pixel users. We’ve already seen album art as part of the Enhanced Now Playing option, which also allows your phone to use Google’s cloud resources to identify hard-to-identify songs – normally, Now Playing runs entirely on-device. In fact, once we open it we can see album art for new songs – it doesn’t seem to come back and pull up your entire history of album art.

While we haven’t discovered preset player options yet, the team 9 to 5 google Reports have seen it arrive, so it’s likely they’re part of the same wave of deployments, just switched differently. Keep an eye out for all these Now Playing enhancements on Pixel 6 or later smartphones.