Play’s bare-bones home screen offers three options: Library, Shuffle and Identify. Library, naturally, takes you to your tunes (all stored locally — no trendy cloud music here). Shuffle is the Genius-like option. You can create a playlist based on a single song, or simply tell the app to create a playlist based on the kind of tunes it knows you listen to a lot. This is the algorithmic option for when you stumble to your car in the morning, bleary-eyed and decaffeinated, and want to listen to music that works for you, but you don’t want to make any decisions.
Identify is where the Shazam-like functi onality comes in. Yahoo doesn’t yet have quite as extensive a library as Shazam; In my tests, I managed to fox it completely with the 1 Giant Leap album, for example.
But where the Identify feature shines is its “Continuous” option. As you’d imagine, this listens continuously to the music playing — taking samples every 30 seconds or so — and builds a list of tunes. At a party or a club where you really like the music but don’t want to bother the host or DJ for the full set list? Enjoying the light rock set on the radio but can’t name any of the songs? Then your app has arrived.
Play is a little too bare-bones at the moment. There’s no way to purchase songs once you’ve identified them, though Yahoo says that’s coming soon. The option to play from the cloud — or from Google Music‘s local cache — would be great. And of course we’d love to see an iPhone ve rsion, as would Yahoo,...
