8 ms·
Shazam is the one app that has been around since about the birth of the iPhone that honestly still blows my mind in it's capabilities. The fact it can so quickl
by bluetidepro 8y ago
Shazam is the one app that has been around since about the birth of the iPhone that honestly still blows my mind in it's capabilities. The fact it can so quickly figure out any song in so many environments is incredible. Call me simple, but I use it almost daily, and it is accurate close to 98% of the time. I absolutely love Shazam's iOS app, and they have done a great job keeping up with UI/UX treads for it over the many years it has been around. Easily one of my favorite and most used apps.
With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration.
- creaghpatr 8y agoYeah, Shazam was the last Zero to One moment I had with Tech. A true, visceral in-the-moment 'wow' that no social media giant or app has come close to emulating. The user value to time investment ratio is off the charts for Shazam. I love music and what they have done for it, especially in the context of other music apps like Spotify et al. Second the Don't Ruin It Apple plea, but congrats to the creators on a well-deserved exit.
- screye 8y agoGoogle Now natively supports song detection in surroundings. It is also pretty good at it, and Google will do it passively without ever needing to open it as an app. I used Shazam a long time ago, so dunno how it had changed, but it certainly isn't a novel idea.
- zimmund 8y agoGoogle Now won't detect music for you outside the US (Shazam does)
- on_and_off 8y agosoundhound will though :) I have not used it in a while, but I used to have both apps on my phone
- Sekhmet 8y agoIt works in Poland (tested few seconds ago).
- ChrisArchitect 8y agoworks in Canada
- ArnoVW 8y agoGoogle now works in France
- stanmancan 8y agoand Google will do it passively without ever needing to open it as an app. Listening 24/7 isn't a privacy invasion at all.
- on_and_off 8y agoIt uses an offline database of songs to make this feature work, without uploading your surrounding sounds.
- thinkloop 8y agoSeriously? Shouldn't that be gb's of data? If anything would be cloud dependent, I thought this would be it.
- yunyu 8y agoThe amount of songs with fingerprints stored on-device is several orders of magnitudes lower than the full library (tens of thousands instead of millions): https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now-playing-song-identification-works/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now-p...
- nerfhammer 8y agoit only supports the most popular few thousand songs
- on_and_off 8y agoTurns, out most of us are boring and predicable and storing prints for 10 000 songs is enough to recognize most of the songs people are listening to.
- chrisweekly 8y agoI'm with you. Shazam -> Spotify is incredibly useful.
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoTl;dr You're kinda boned. Apple Music integration will get better, but Spotify should be looking for an exit - before they get kicked out the door. Not saying I agree with this, but given how most acquisitions go, other services don't survive long. Apple Music has an Android app, but that's more of a halo effect kind of thing to get people in the ecosystem and (eventually) switch to iOS.
- endorphone 8y agoI agree with the lauding of Shazam, but I am interested in your statement "I use it almost daily" -- what for? I've always viewed Shazam as a novelty and have installed and uninstalled it a few random times, but as Jobs would say it seems like a feature not a product.
- alfredmuffin 8y agoI can't speak for who you're replying to, but I find myself using it at restaurants, bars, and public locations where music is playing, as well as friends' cars, and other social gatherings. I know these sort of situations are rare for the average HN user.
- Cyph0n 8y ago> I know these sort of situations are rare for the average HN user. A generalization if I ever saw one.
- Mononokay 8y agoHave you ever heard about the concept of the "joke?" Novelty thing, I tell you. Admittedly, it might be a bit too recent of a concept for the average person to be aware of, especially with how radical it is. Here's a recent book of them, to help you get "in" on the "hip slang" of tomorrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philogelos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philogelos
- Cyph0n 8y agoHave you heard of Poe’s law?
- alfredmuffin 8y agoPeople like you take the fun out of this community
- whamlastxmas 8y agoI can't really be bothered to install an app for this purpose but I'm constantly disappointed that Google's assistant is so bad at picking up music. I would say it works less than half the time. It only works in public areas if it's pretty quiet.
- fnord123 8y ago>With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. This looks to me like an acquihire for the ML/AI/DL talent. So basically, yes they will be diverted to other projects.
- spanishgum 8y agoIs Shazam really ML/AI/DL? I thought it was more of a signal processing and search engine system. You transform snippets of audio signals into text, pump it into a distributed database, and then perform a search against that. Maybe there is some AI involved in noise reduction, but that seems like a rather small component.
- fnord123 8y agoThey do something that gets results. It doesn't matter if it's ML, AI, DL, linear regression, or just fingerprint+cosine similarity. There's some talent for getting some complex shit done.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dotdi 8y agoThey do audio fingerprinting[1], so no ML/AI in the core feature. ------ [1]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
- acjohnson55 8y ago"Music information retrieval" is what researchers call the overarching field. You might say the Shazam algorithm is akin to those fields in the sense that it relies on feature extraction. It's possible they may train a classifier to do the matching, but yeah, probably not purely ML/AI/DL.
- vasco 8y agoWhat ML/AI? This is fourier transforms and some nice UX.
- 0xcafecafe 8y agoSecond this. And not just for english music. I have lost track how many times I have pulled up shazam to identify a bollywood song or an Indian regional song which I recognize vaguely from my childhood. It has always recognized it.
- kodablah 8y ago> still blows my mind in it's capabilities. Just to jog people's memory, patent threats were sent to others doing similar things [0]. Not sure if that represents Shazam or not, but if so, they'll fit in perfectly with Apple. 0 - http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/ http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/
- jakobegger 8y agoI thought Apple only went after big companies that copied their design? I've never heard of Apple threatening individuals in the Open Source community -- am I missing something?
- kodablah 8y ago> am I missing something? Not particularly. With conditionals added, we can differentiate any behavior and pretend similarities don't exist.
- alpb 8y agoSoundhound is comparable in terms of detection quality and probably will keep their Spotify integration running in case Shazam locks people into Apple's ecosystem.
- dazzawazza 8y agoI frequent mostly heavy metal pubs and for the last 5 years neither shazam nor sound hound has detected a single song for anyone near me. Complete crap. We've been using the ancient technique of asking the DJ on the way to the bar.
- robbomacrae 8y agoSome genres are definitely trickier to identify than others. EDM and heavy metal being two of the most difficult for example. I find the short segments are a little less unique. Try letting go the app get the full 10 seconds - the longer the better. Source: I used to work on algos at SoundHound. And I like these genres too :(
- frenchman_in_ny 8y agoWhile I find Shazam to be amazing, I find SoundHound's capabilities even better in terms of identifying a song based on humming the tune or hearing a live version. I was at a live jazz concert last night, and the trio started playing a riff on tune I recognized but couldn't exactly place. SoundHound nailed it (Sonny Rollins "Four"), while Shazam had no idea.
- acjohnson55 8y agoThat's because that's not how Shazam's recognition works (unless they have a secondary mechanism). Shazam is very sensitive to time and frequency features of specific recordings, which is also what makes it so robust in noisy environments. Having both apps is handy for their relative strengths.
- dopamean 8y agoMy experience with shazam is that it finds about a quarter of the tracks I'm looking for. It's really really incredibly good at finding anything that airs on the radio or exists in spotify. But outside of that the results drop off quickly.
- thirdsun 8y agoYes, that's my experience as well. I listen to and discover a lot of obscure, often rare music and Shazam isn't very helpful in these niches. Although that might be expected. On a sidenote: It's surprising that Google isn't more useful in those searches either. Often I have to search for rare releases by relying on lyrics and Google's results are plain terrible. I understand that the lyrics are probably nowhere listed and idnexed, but considering that even the rarest releases are uploaded by someone on Youtube, some kind of auto transcription feature would be very helpful. Sure, it's a niche interest, but the Discogs user base is still huge.
- dopamean 8y agoI spend a lot of time on Discogs.
- iamben 8y agoBirth of the iPhone?! I remember using Shazam on my dumbphone driving home from university. That must have been 2002/3. Blew my mind. Pretty incredible really. Good for them!
- Dolores12 8y agoshazam algo have been reverse engineered. nothing stops someone to create another shazam in case apple screw it.
- capkutay 8y ago> With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple I don't think the overall UX, song recognition, tag tracking will be ruined > Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration. Well that was pretty much what Apple paid for. I can already see that all my shazam tags automatically show up in Apple Music for me. Clearly this is just becoming another growth channel for Apple music which means their Spotify integration will likely be diminished or end.
- djrogers 8y ago> I can already see that all my shazam tags automatically show up in Apple Music for me That was happening before the acquisition as well
- starpilot 8y agoSoundHound is much better.
- tokyodude 8y agodoes Shazam also sync up lyrics? I havent used Shazam in years since I discovered Soundhound. Soundhound has a better ux imo and it also brings up the lyrics for popular songs and they are synced to the music as in they scroll by at the right place like karaoke
- dapreja 8y agoI just hope they don't shit on the android support like Snapchat. It's the first ever paid app i got and i'd like to think that's saying something for an android user. Probably far fetch but it would be nice the android version became open source if that should ever get dropped by apple (so community can maintain it)