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I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.
by kin 9y ago
I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.
- mwilliaams 9y agoApple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.
- amelius 9y ago(removed)
- coppolaemilio 9y agoIt is already working. It is not that simple to start from scratch and get it working properly + the DB and everything
- ghaff 9y agoYou'd need access to the fingerprints database but otherwise should be fairly straightforward. What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done.
- amelius 9y ago> What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done. Well, you could translate the music into actual notes (or musical intervals), and use Smith-Waterman (or any more advanced and more recent technique) to find the song with the lowest edit-distance.
- rhizome 9y agoConverting digital audio to notes is both not as easy as it sounds and not how Shazam works. https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing-fingerprinting-and-recognition https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...
- amelius 9y agoYes, you can look at the frequency with the highest intensity in the FFT. This is the "dumb" version of converting music to notes (and is what I really intended to say but didn't choose to for sake of brevity).
- rhizome 9y agoThe thing is that the process looks for spectral patterns, let's call it "harmonic content per unit of time," not just notes. Mere notes would result in lots and lots of false positives.
- amelius 9y agoLet's just agree that the process is not too far removed from my initial brief description, and should be simple to implement, as the article shows. For any competent signal processing engineer, this should all be evident, which was the main point. Also, even if you have many false positives, you have already narrowed down the search, and this allows you to do more brute-force searching like computing cross-correlations.
- cortesoft 9y agoWhere are you going to get 'the music'? There are millions and millions of hours of music out there, how are you going to gather and fingerprint it all?
- azinman2 9y agoUhh isn’t creating the “fingerprint” the non-straightforward part? Keep in mind you could start listening at any point in the song as well.
- paulcole 9y ago> isn't it possible to build this yourself in Python in an afternoon? Is anyone keeping a running list of products that HN commenters have suggested could be built in an afternoon/weekend? Ones I've seen so far: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and now Shazaam.
- fuck_google 9y agoBuilding the service is not usually the hard part, but building the ecosystem around it is. There were/are countless services similar to Facebook or Twitter, but only a few of them can be really successful because of herd mentality.
- dawnerd 9y agoI'd be more curious to see you try to build this in an afternoon. Also, it works a lot better than being able to find "slightly distorted" versions. It can catch a song in a noisy room where you can barely make out the song to begin with. Couple months back it found a song when there was a very loud crowd yelling over it. They're also able to determine differences between versions of songs pretty well. Some remixes might sound very close to the original. Other thing you might be missing is just how fast it is even on a slow mobile connection.
- amelius 9y ago(removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)
- mmmmmbop 9y agoSo they're doing this vector correlation for every song in their database (40 million)?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vedant 9y agoThis is a heap of nonsense. Not only does this summarily dismiss the enormous challenges in digital signal processing required for removing arbitrary background audio, it exposes some confusion associated with the ideas of correlated random variables, inner products, and affine transformations.
- amelius 9y ago> it exposes some confusion associated with the ideas of correlated random variables, inner products Read this article, then come back: [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation
- xapata 9y ago
- Zenst 9y agoSome insight into the Shazam tech and article has a link to the algorithm being used. https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing-fingerprinting-and-recognition https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...
- amelius 9y agoThanks. This actually proves my point that the core concepts of Shazam can be implemented in a weekend. Of course, programming the front-end etc. is more work, but that is besides the point.
- vedant 9y agoThis has the smell of a comment written by someone with limited real-world experience. Simply writing down the list of problems you would have to solve to build Shazam would take an entire afternoon. Yes, deep neural networks have proven remarkably useful for machine perception, but you would still need to collect a colossal amount of audio data, fingerprint all of it, build a low-latency processing infrastructure for making inferences, and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance.
- amelius 9y ago> and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance. That's actually the easy part. You already have the music. Distorting it by superimposing background noise is really not difficult.
- throwawayfinal 9y agoThe easy part? If you're apple, google, or microsoft, maybe.
- amelius 9y agoCan you explain? I mean, you can easily find thousands of hours of music online. Recording background noise is easy (just go to a random bar where they are not playing music). Now simply add the two signals (you can shift them randomly to generate more data). You can also add some linear filtering if you like (just imagine random settings of an equalizer for starters). This should give you enough data to build a proof of concept at least.
- throwawayfinal 9y agoFor training: Illegally grabbing thousands of hours of music to train a commercial model hardly qualifies as fair use. Any company you build upon that would be tainted. For sustaining: In addition, you'll need to keep an updated catalog of music to identify new songs against, and most uses of a service like shazam are to find names of songs people aren't familiar with, so that catalog needs to be very fresh. That means you'll have to grab some sort of feed, and engage in large scale music piracy for commercial gain or have access to a library of songs from many disparate music providers, such as ascap. Background noise: there are literally hundreds of different background noise environments you need to train against. Dozens of common microphone configurations. Clipping, variations. It's very much a problem where a proof of concept is neat but doesn't really get you anywhere.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoYeah you can build the platform but you won't have any data; no history of searches. You also won't have any users. I'm not disputing they overpaid. However, long to short, building the technology is the easy part, and just a fraction of the brand / product value.
- lavezzi 9y agoy'all realise they run a music service too right? Having access to cross-platform data that gives them insight into bleeding edge emerging/trending artists and songs is priceless.
- amelius 9y agoApple already had a music service too (itunes).
- oarsinsync 9y agoDifferent signals. "What's that song?" is a different signal to buying a song. Especially when "what's that song?" isn't restricted by licensing agreements.
- donarb 9y agoIt's not only the song recognition technology, Shazam also has video recognition and AR technology.
- ska 9y agoA tiny percentage of the time occasionally when a successful company makes a N-hundred million purchase of a technology and company and you don't understand why, it's because they have made a mistake. The smart money, though, is on the main chance: you don't understand the purchase, or the problem domain, or both. In this case I think you are overestimating the progress in NN and search, and underestimating the signal processing. Have you tried this with any significant corpus? "Whack it through a FFT and do correlation " seems like one of the obvious solution to the toy problem version, but this is exactly the sort of thing that usually falls apart in practice.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoGo build it yourself in an afternoon and come back. Then we'll talk.
- pookeh 9y agoIt's not the tech, it's the data.
- arprocter 9y agoIt'll be interesting to see how long the Android version lasts
- zjaffee 9y agoIt's odd that they didn't try to purchase soundhound then. The company has more evolved tech, and also has voice recognition services beyond just music through houndify.
- threeseed 9y agoIt's not just voice recognition. Shazam has an augmented reality based advertising platform.
- drusepth 9y agoIf they bought soundhound for the tech to bake into their own service, they'd be competing with Shazam. If they bought Shazam for the tech to bake into their own service, soundhound would just exist as an alternative. Seems like an attempt to buy the "name brand" to get tech and inherently beat the competition at the same time. Note: I've never heard of soundhound though, so it might be popular in some places. Shazam is like the name-brand of music recognition though, to the extent of being a verb.
- couchdive 9y agothats what they did with the MOG turned BEATS music turned apple music in 8 months.
- annexrichmond 9y agoWhat basis do you have for that? When they bought Workflow they didn't kill it.
- jonknee 9y agoWorkflow wasn't a popular Android application that sends users to a competing service though... I could see the app live on iOS with Spotify integration stripped out, but seriously doubt it has a future on Android.
- jdminhbg 9y agoApple Music is on Android, it could just redirect to that and live on.
- nerfhammer 9y agoApple would have no problem implementing something similar. It's the brand, mindshare and music store/service lead gen that's more difficult to replicate. Why get rid of an icon that's already on everyone's phones that could be a funnel to apple music instead of spotify?
- asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago>Why get rid of an icon that's already on everyone's phones that could be a funnel to apple music instead of spotify? because it's not Apple
- scosman 9y agoSiri has had this feature for a while, so unlikely for the tech.
- stingraycharles 9y agoWhich they implemented using Shazam. http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/19/siri-partners-with-shazam-to-recognize-songs-in-ios-8 http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/19/siri-partners-with...
- lavezzi 9y agoWill be annoyed if they break the feature inside Snapchat.
- ryanSrich 9y agoHuh. I thought Apple completely killed Spotify. I personally had to switch because Artists started doing exclusives with Apple only and I really couldn't justify Spotify over Apple Music, even though I much preferred Spotify's experience. I've also noticed Apple's catalogue is much larger than Spotify's. Is Spotify getting better? I'd love to switch back.
- taormina 9y agoWho are you missing? I have yet to notice anyone.
- eat_veggies 9y agoI haven't used apple music before, but spotify's ml recommenders are really impressive, and most of my favorite songs and artists were recommended to me via its "discover weekly" playlist. Its apps are super slick (cross device play/control is really handy!), especially compared to itunes. Just buy a month of premium ($10/month or $5 if you're a student) and try it.
- X86BSD 9y agoYeah I agree with this. Spotify is a good experience. Save one. Their security is shit. After having my account hacked for the unpteenth time I finally threw in the towel since they clearly are not interested in securing their damn service and jumped to Apple Music. The UI is not as good as Spotify but I don’t worry about my account being hacked every week and their catalog is bigger at Apple Music. My wife found some obscure ass Pakistani tune she loved since she was a kid in Delhi. That was hardcore. Spotify never had much desi stuff. I hope Spotify fixes their security woes. Either way I have no reason to leave Apple Music now.
- threeseed 9y agoApple Music has recommendation playlists as well: New Music Mix, Favourites Mix and Chill Mix which all get updated weekly based on your likes/dislikes and existing music collection. I actually find Spotify apps to be far worse than iTunes at least on iOS. And the Apple Watch app for Apple Music is really impressive.