Remember that feeling you had the first time you used Shazam to discover that song you heard over the Woolworths PA system? “Surely it couldn’t recognise the tune just by listening to it,” you thought at the time, only to look on in surprise as your phone told you that Sugar Ray’s ‘Fly’ was soundtracking your grocery shopping. Well, what if you could do the same for album covers?

As Pitchfork reports, an industrious music lover named Patrick Weaver has created the Record Player app, which helps you find an album based on its cover alone.

So how does it work? Well, let’s say you see one of those frustrating albums in your local record store which features no artist or title name on the cover. All you need to do is take a photo of the cover, upload it to the app, and then the Google Cloud Vision API will take a look around before telling you what it thinks it is, and bringing up a Spotify link for the album if it can.

Check out a video of how it works below.

Newest experiment made with @glitch, @Spotify and @googlecloud, a record player with computer vision: https://t.co/fhQsEruCoF pic.twitter.com/z54s9GIbYc

— Patrick Weaver (@patrickweave_r) May 2, 2018

This is also going to end up making it a heck of a lot easier to try an album before you buy it, meaning you can say goodbye to that age-old issue of falling into a trap where you buy an album based on a hit single, only to discover the rest of the album sounds totally different.

Of course, if your photo is a bit too blurry or if the album isn’t on Spotify, you might end up running into a few hurdles, but really, the considering how smart technology is and how much music is available on Spotify, that probably won’t be a very common problem.

Check out the Record Player app here.

The article was originally published on Tone Deaf