Finally, a System to Tell You What Song You’re Listening to on Vinyl

Many fans of vinyl records insist that they can hear a difference. Detractors will point out that a lossless digital file has even greater fidelity. Regardless of the truth, putting on a record and actively listening to the music is an enjoyable experience that is hard to replicate in our modern digital world. But as nice as that is, record players have a major flaw: they don’t display information about what you’re listening to. How are you supposed to know which track you’re on or the name of that track while the record is spinning? Nomasideas’s solution was to build this system to display the “now playing” song.

In practice, this looks a lot like what we’re used to in the age of digital music and streaming services. A large display shows the name of the playing song, its album, and the artist, along with a low-resolution image of the album cover. But instead of simply checking the metadata of a digital audio file, it finds that information by listening to and identifying the music.

This works thanks to Shazamio, which is an open source Python library that works with the Shazam API. If you’ve been stranded on a desert island for the last decade, you should know that Shazam is a wonderfully useful service capable of identifying music through sound alone. It is pretty magical and Nomasideas took advantage of that for this project.

Nomasideas used a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to run Shazamio. It looks at the audio coming from the record player via a USB dongle with a line-in jack. The script records 10 seconds of audio and then uses Shazamio to look up the song. Once the Shazam API returns results, the script displays the information on a large RGB LED matrix that is visible to everyone in the room.

You probably know what record you put on, but this could be useful if you don’t have the track list memorized or if visitors want to know what song they’re hearing.