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Shazam is the closest thing we have to witchcraft. I'm sure plenty of HNers will chime in with "well acktually..." type comments about how they could write it i
by SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Shazam is the closest thing we have to witchcraft. I'm sure plenty of HNers will chime in with "well acktually..." type comments about how they could write it in their basement in a weekend, but to do what it does, as quickly as it does, on the ridiculously enormous library of music that it does is really something special.
- bluetidepro 8y agoAgreed 100%. It's the one app that truly does feel magical to me. And it still impresses people I show who don't use it regularly when we are out somewhere and they ask the age old "what song is this?" Pull out my phone, click one button, and in less than 5 seconds it's there. Blows my mind every-time.
- jonwachob91 8y ago>> Shazam is the closest thing we have to witchcraft. I've never used Shazam, but I used a similar feature on my LG Chocolate back in the day. How is Shazam any different than what my LG Chocolate did (aside from the Spotify integration)?
- lobo_tuerto 8y agoI don't understand why you do expect others to know about that when Shazam is ubiquitous and you haven't bothered to try it yet. See for yourself. Expecting people to know how is it different from an LG Chocolate is just absurd...
- icebraining 8y agoApparently Verizon's LG Chocolate came with a service called VCast Song ID, that did the same thing as Shazam: "On certain phones, users can record a 10-second clip of a song, have it automatically identified, and optionally buy a copy of it for playback on a phone or computer." (https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/name-that-tune-with-verizon-v-cast-song-id/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/name-that-tune-with-ver...) That said, Shazam is actually older, having started as a shortcode service in the UK way back in 2002.
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoI am equal parts amazed and horrified when I hear that some app started out as an MMS hack on feature phones. Dictionary lookups, directions, and multimedia, all on "candybars". It's one area the US never really got behind and jumped straight to smartphones and discrete apps. How exactly did this come to be? That's the anthology I want to read.
- busterarm 8y agoMaybe my listening tastes are just _that weird_, but I've found that it's only accurate about 50% of the time for those times when I really need it. It's also pretty garbage for classical music.
- cwilkes 8y agoI haven’t had it misidentify anything — it just won’t identify a song. Granted I do this when in a public place and usually it is something like a piano rendition of another song. I really can’t blame it for not being able to hear the music as it is hard for me to.
- avip 8y agoWell acktually, in my admittedly limited experience, Shazam is not capable of recognizing any music at all without the digitized metadata encoded with sound files. I've tried multiple times to sing very popular songs to it. It never recognized them. You could attribute it to my poor musical skills (and I'm fine with that), but 100% of humans would recognize the songs in < 10s timeframe.
- alfredmuffin 8y agoSounds like the problem was your singing.
- pvinis 8y agoPun intended?
- FPGAhacker 8y agoTo the best of my knowledge, Shazam works on frequency spectrum analysis and how it changes over time. This includes all aspects of the music and not just melody.
- chrisweekly 8y agoTry SoundHound for singing
- avip 8y agoI have. It outperforms Shazam hands down for this use case. But still very limited.
- smoe 8y agoAs far as I know, the way Shazam uses fingerprints it is not supposed to recognize any song this way. Or even when a cover or a live version of a song is played. I remember Adam Neely (A musician/jazz composer/youtuber) mentioning in a Q&A, that for songs they played live for a television broadcast, backing tracks were added underneath and it was mixed as close as possible to the originals, among other reasons for the purpose of them being better "shazamable". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH_5j3Wm9qM&t=11m38s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH_5j3Wm9qM&t=11m38s
- Timmah 8y agoIt creates a time series of frequencies then checks a db for that same series. A problem that is easily parallelizable. Probably does some filtering first. It's a very useful and clever application, but not that technically challenging. The most amazing feat is they got access to the catalogs of the record labels. I wish someone would do the same thing for commercials on TV. Auto detect the commercial and advance the DVR by its exact duration
- akhilcacharya 8y agoAren't most commercials sold in 30-60 second blocks?
- Timmah 8y agoYeah. So if you skipped 60 seconds on a 30 second commercial you'd cut into your program. Hence the identification requirement.
- dylan604 8y agoThat's why TIVO (or whichever DVR company) had the skip 30 seconds button. If it was a 60, you hit it twice. However, they also sell 15 second blocks. Now, it's just fast forward at ludicrous speeds.
- icebraining 8y agohttps://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Removing_Commercials https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Removing_Commercials
- h1srf 8y ago> I wish someone would do the same thing for commercials on TV. Auto detect the commercial and advance the DVR by its exact duration They've had it for years now. I was skipping commercials on my HTPC back in 2007-ish. I think the older Tivo's also had this ability.
- Jyaif 8y agoYes shazam's algorithm is aktually pretty simple math, but there's nothing wrong with creating a busines sbased on simple tech! Like most companies in tech, it's the business part that is hard, not the technical part.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWhen Twitter came out I was like "well it's a glorified shoutbox, I can hack that in an afternoon". Actually it still is, any developer can create a Twitter clone in hours. However Twitter managed to have the network effect, and (eventually) solve the huge scaling challenge that a system that transfers billions (?) of messages worldwide every day.
- Jyaif 8y agoTwitter is hard to scale, you have to make trade-offs all over the place. AFAIK that's not the case of Shazam where a read-only database would be enough. Sure eventually you have to manage multiple versions of your app and be able to gradually update your DB, but that's still simple stuff compared to the problem of how to make money.
- watty 8y agoI don't mean to take away from Shazam (because I too was amazed when I first used it) but the Pixel phones have Shazam-like ability built in which uses minimal battery and without internet... and it's constantly running any time music plays. Not really "magic" how it works but still pretty amazing that I can pull the phone out of my pocket any time I hear a song I like and immediately see the band/title.
- emodendroket 8y agoThey do? I use a Pixel 2 XL and I had no idea about this.
- ariwilson 8y agohttps://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7535326?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7535326?hl=en
- emodendroket 8y agoNeat.
- gregknicholson 8y ago> Pixel phones have Shazam-like ability built in which uses minimal battery and without internet... and it's constantly running any time music plays. Is it on by default? Cos that sounds really creepy.
- bradstewart 8y agoNo, it's not.
- ProAm 8y agoShazam is also on by default [1] , so they are both creepy [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8ee3/shazam-keeps-your-macs-microphone-always-on-even-when-you-turn-it-off https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8ee3/shazam-kee...
- brazzledazzle 8y agoI think the “actually” makes it even better. Even if the underlying technology isn’t anything truly special the application of it is pretty clever.
- henrik_w 8y agoHere is a good write-up on how it works: http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/
- vernie 8y agoHere's some code that strips down a song to its Shazam-able fingerprint: https://github.com/jvbalen/soundofshazam/blob/master/sound_of_shazam_simple.ipynb https://github.com/jvbalen/soundofshazam/blob/master/sound_o... And an example output (try Shazam-ing it!): https://soundcloud.com/sample_noise/shazuffle-ii-shazam-me https://soundcloud.com/sample_noise/shazuffle-ii-shazam-me
- QasimK 8y agoAbsolutely fascinating, it covers so much breadth too!
- saganus 8y agoAnd here's a Java project with similar functionality (although I'm not sure it will have near the same accuracy). [0] He also got some legal threats just for publishing code he created himself. [0] http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/ http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/
- gnulinux 8y agoOoook I don't want to be that guy, but if you take a signal processing course in a university, you'd see that algorithms that Shazam probably uses aren't blackmagic. In UC Berkeley one of the projects we did in our Linear Algebra class was doing something like Shazam; the input was a 5 seconds of a random song tuned down so much that human hear can barely hear and white noise added. Then the problem is matching this record with the song and specify start and end time (e.g. 2:30 to 2:35). Shazam is probably much more complex than this (I don't use it) but if college freshmen can do this...
- vernie 8y agoPedant baited.
- gnulinux 8y agoWhy can't I delete comments in HN? If from the responses to my comment I learned that I add nothing to do conversation, I want to be able to delete my comments. Am I missing something?
- gknoy 8y agoFor what it's worth, I think it's neat that you shared that the knowledge necessary to build a Shazam-like thing is something an undergraduate might do as a homework assignment. I had thought it would be a lot more complicated. :)
- gnulinux 8y agoIf you're interested, you can search Berkeley EE16A and if you're lucky you'll find the homework assignment (Berkeley's class materials are always open to public). It was like a Jupyter notebook and the "song" was I think random 5 seconds of Universal Declarations of Human Rights, or something like that. I'm writing this in case it helps your search, I'm at work so I don't have time to search it myself. I took this class a while ago and am alumni so my memory is fuzzy about the details of this assignment.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tw04 8y agoI mean, given that Google still can't even get close, I'd be inclined to tell every last one of them they're full of it. I actually bought Shazam on android after repeated attempts at getting google to find music in the same way - they're laughably bad.
- notatoad 8y agomy recent experience with shazam is that it's much less accurate than Google when picking out random background music from a noisy area. that said, i still prefer shazam because it's an actual app, whereas google's implementation is a button that sometimes appears in the google app, and sometimes doesn't, seemingly at random.
- cannam 8y agoI agree with you, and I work in music audio signal processing. Shazam was founded in 1999-2000 ish and was live by 2002, longer ago than many people realise. The fingerprinting method they used was a novel one, and they successfully deployed it in a couple of years, with a database of two million tracks, in a system that could be used by dialling a number from any phone. It's an extraordinary and rare example of taking a research method and getting it to work at scale in the face of real constraints, in the process producing something that most people would never have imagined could be done.
- kidsnow 8y agoTHAT is the kind of startup I wish I could work for.
- meowface 8y agoMe too. Are there any similar startup with functional prototypes or products? Something like Shazam, or Theranos if it were actually legitimate and had a working product.
- someguy101010 8y agoipfs?
- jciochon 8y agoSoundHound would fit the bill.
- acjohnson55 8y agoEcho Nest was like them, but they got gobbled up by Spotify several years ago.
- tajen 8y agoLet’s hope it means their main patents expire circa 2022, which is not too far away.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
- amelius 8y agoMy data point: I often go to parties where they play African and world music. Shazam fails more often than not ... The interesting thing is: most of these songs are on YouTube, so in theory Google could build a better Shazam.
- nerdnumerouno 8y agoExactly! Maybe if you listen to the billboard hits you'll always find a match, but IME it rarely matches the songs I actually don't know and can't find details on.
- captainmuon 8y agoAfter I learned how it roughly works, it seems no longer like witchcraft, but it is still impressive. The remaining thing I don't understand now is how the heck they managed to negotiate the license for all the songs they have in the database. A friend of mine had a major website for lyrics, and he got some legal trouble from the record companies. When he tried to buy a license to display the lyrics, after some back and forth, they basically said they're not interested in licensing. This was in the early 2000s before streaming took off. Since that time I have the impression that often legal and social problems are much harder to solve than technological ones.
- samstave 8y agoThey are likely able to show that the DB is comprised of simply the fingerprints, and not the full songs - thus they wouldnt be able to "use" the DB to profit from play-back of the songs it can identify.
- justifier 8y agoeven more mystic in its infancy when it was an abbreviated phone number you would call, hold up the phone mic near the source, get hung up on and then recieve a txt with your song title and artist.. in 2002 (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_%28application%29#Early_days_of_the_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_%28application%29#Early...
- tootie 8y agoI mean, it's never worked for me even once that I can recall. I've mostly tried to identify music playing in commercial spaces (retail, cafes, etc) via Siri and I don't think it's ever given me an answer.
- on_and_off 8y agoSoundhound is pretty great too ! I have worked on integrating a shazam like library inside an app. We have looks at more than 12 solutions before finding a company with a song recognition library good enough to be called shazam like. It is by no mean a small feat you can reproduce during a weekend.