A 'Now Playing' system shows the name of the track currently playing on a website or app.

Almost all other radio stations have been able to provide this due to playing all material via a computer playout system, usually giving the presenter no choice as to what they play. Whereas Caroline has traditionally given the presenter quite a lot of free choice in both what they play and the media they play it from. This has made doing a 'now playing' extremely challenging.

In fact we had to wait for the right technology to come along – Automatic Content Recognition aka "acoustic fingerprinting". This is where a song is boiled down to its basic parts and encoded to produce a unique digital fingerprint which can be matched against a large database of known songs.

We have employed the commercial service ACRCloud for this who take our main channel webstream and produce metadata for the currently playing song. It's all very clever, if not always 100% accurate. While getting it right more than 95% of the time, it can also throw up some howlers, usually because of songs being sampled and appearing in others. Or the vagaries of compilation albums.

Like the similar Shazam app, it may also may take a number of seconds to pick up the playing song, or in the case of very recent material it may not pick it up at all.

If you wish to report a 'howler' please use the Now Playing Reporter below. But please make sure you are listening to our main UK channel first and the song you are correcting is actually playing.

Be aware that sometimes a song isn't picked up at all, at which point the previous song will disappear after a while. If you don't see a song please wait a while before reporting a 'blank' situation. Include your name and email address if you wish, but if you wish to remain anonymous leave them blank.