7 ms·
Shazam is a feature not a product: index the Fourier Transform of all songs.
by eggie5 9y ago
Shazam is a feature not a product: index the Fourier Transform of all songs.
- reaperducer 9y agoIt's surprisingly easy to do. I know a company that has a bank of servers listening to streaming radio stations all day and night, fingerprinting the songs and taking the track and artist names from the stream to create an in-house Shazam.
- Cyberdog 9y agoI bet the stream operators paying the bandwidth bills don't appreciate that too much. What does this company need an "in-house Shazam" for?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 9y agoPresumably he's talking about Mediabase, or Meltwater, or something along those lines.
- sushisource 9y agoJust out of curiosity what need do they have for in-house Shazam?
- oh_sigh 9y agoCrawl public facebook videos, automatically figure out what they were watching/listening to in the background, and correlate that with their public demographic information.
- DrJokepu 9y agoI also happen to know the company you’re talking about. However, what they’re doing is way more complicated than a simple Fourier transform, it’s not easy to do at all.
- reaperducer 9y agoMust be a different company, then.
- notyourwork 9y agoWould love to hear more about this and what is complicated and the type of problem they are solving. I have little experience with audio.
- jaytaylor 9y agohttp://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ It's your lucky day :)
- notyourwork 9y agoThis is really great, thanks for sharing!
- pan69 9y agoRadio stations use this kind of technology to keep track of the amount commercial content is played which gives then gives them a indication on royalties they need to pay.
- on_and_off 9y agoMy company has shopped around for a 'shazam library' to integrate to our product. We tried a dozen of these before finding one that was actually working reliably enough.
- colordrops 9y agoThere's an app as well as their huge database that the algorithm wouldn't work without.
- catshirt 9y agoit’s just a button. and in a perfect world I wouldn’t even need a button
- threeseed 9y agoSure. Search, Buy, Publish, Analyze, Like are also just buttons. But there are tens of thousands of the best developers and billions in investment to make those buttons work.
- catshirt 9y agowhat is your point? saying the algorithm "wouldn't work" without an app is like saying my door doesn't work without a doorknob. OP made a point: Shazam is not magic, and people have the opportunity to compete or DIY. to me, it seems simple/contrarian/not helpful to respond with "they have an app too"
- threeseed 9y agoThe point is that saying Shazam is just a button ignores the huge amount of effort that sits behind it. Not just the technology but more importantly the sales and marketing to get to the number of users they have. Amazon or Youtube are not magic either. But good luck getting to that same scale without significant effort.
- catshirt 9y agoand saying "they have an app" is ignoring OP's actual point, which is all i am trying to defend. no one is calling into question the merit it's taken to build Shazam as a company. how do i find myself defending the most ridiculous shit here?... like an algorithm can't work without a UI. > guy 1: "index the Fourier Transform of all songs" > guy 2: "[don't forget about] their huge database[!]" how is this not contrarian? biz guy spotted? the dude straight up fucking said to build a database of "ALL SONGS". if you think that's simple you're either not thinking hard enough or you have no idea what he's talking about.
- threeseed 9y agoGoogle Search is a feature not a product: index the content of all web pages. So not sure your statement makes much sense. When you have that much customer data then it's absolutely a product.
- blktiger 9y agoGoogle search is more than just indexing the content of all web pages though. It's also getting people to the result they're searching for which is significantly more complex. That said, it's still a feature which is why Google makes it's money off of advertising instead. That's the real Google product in relation to their search feature.
- threeseed 9y agoGoogle Search is not a feature. It's a product. They have product owners, product managers, product roadmaps etc and it's fundamental to what Google is as a company. They themselves call it a product: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/ And we can play this game all day if you like. By your ridiculous logic: Spotify, Facebook, WhatsApp, Amazon, Youtube are all just features.
- blktiger 9y agoSure, there's a complexity scale where we arbitrarily consider something a "product" instead of a "feature". In fact the scale can slide as technology improves. Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature.
- wayfarer2s 9y ago> Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature. Mp3 players for example.
- habosa 9y agoIf you can point to any blog post that shows how one would implement Shazam, I'd love to read it. I read somewhere that the Pixel 2's on-device index of 10,000 popular songs was only ~60MB. That blew my mind.
- choochootrain 9y agothe original paper is quite readable: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf shazam's value is obviously in how it scaled this method to millions of users and songs but implementing it for yourself on a limited catalog of songs is a couple days of work once you have the theory. in fact this was a lab project for the intro signal processing class at berkeley that i ta'd.
- epberry 9y agoThanks for the link. I thought these things involved a lot of markov models and gaussian functions but this is mostly just some pretty slick engineering. The 1000x search speed seems very good.
- Scea91 9y agoI can imagine that at the shazam's scale it's just a completely different ball game.
- bluedino 9y agoCheck out this article that was on HN before: http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/ http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/
- eggie5 9y agoA few others have posted references. We did it as a lab in my undergrad signal processing class. Theory is simple: transform time into frequency domain and you have a fingerprint of the song. I guess the value is in the execution, a la Shazam.
- 9y ago
- noitsnot 9y agoThat's ok. Apple is probably just buying it for there team of devs., right? The app./technology is just a bonus.