WhatsApp adds starred music feature to make status songs easier to find

Finding that one song again in WhatsApp's status music catalogue has always meant scrolling and searching from scratch, even for tracks used dozens of times before. That's changing with a new starred music feature spotted in WhatsApp's latest Android beta, letting users bookmark favourites for instant access later.

Meta has steadily expanded the status update music catalogue with more genres, moods, and artists, and more users are adding music to their statuses regularly.

That growth created a real problem: without remembering a song's exact name, tracking down a previously used favourite could take longer than it should.

As you might have guessed by now, the featured starred function has been spotted in the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.26.38.1, and it was made possible by testers Akan and Kingcyrious.

In the music library of the app, you are able to press the star icon beside any song in order to mark it as your favourite song. 

When you do that, the star will change to a full star to indicate that the save was successful, and the song will automatically go to a starred list. There’s no restriction on the number of songs that you can add to the Starred section, and to delete one, you can simply remove the star.

Up until now, the music library had only 3 different sections, and those are Suggested, Mood, and Genre. However, the latest update introduces another section named Starred.

It behaves like the existing filters, so switching between browsing favourites and exploring the full catalogue takes one tap.

The starred filter builds on a related update from a recent beta, which extended status music clips from 15 to 30 seconds and added a waveform selector for choosing exactly which part of a song to use.