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Shazam is one of those rare products that hasn't stopped feeling magical in two decades. They're really the thing technologists aught to aspire to.
by madrox 3y ago
Shazam is one of those rare products that hasn't stopped feeling magical in two decades. They're really the thing technologists aught to aspire to.
- gumballindie 3y agoOh technologists do. But what will product managers do if not constantly break the product to get a bonus and an extra holiday.
- wruza 3y agoAt the same time it turned from “tap to listen, here you go” to a sluggish af and ads-infested bloatware. I remember when I stopped using it and deleted the app because my prev-gen iphone couldn’t load it in time anyway.
- gniv 3y agoThese days you don't need the app. You can put it in the control center and just push the button to listen.
- jedrek 3y agoRight now it's integrated with siri so you just hold down your power button and say, "what is this song?" and it tells you.
- wodenokoto 3y agoWhat are you on about? There’s no ads in Shazam. You just open the app and it starts searching. No need for even tapping a button.
- ahartmetz 3y agoI actually went back to Shazam from SoundHound (on Android). Yeeears back, SoundHound had some advantage, I forget which. Now, Shazam starts in a second (just tried it, never used since last reboot) and SoundHound in like 15 (from memory). Inexcusable in general and for that kind of app in particular.
- roelschroeven 3y agoI seem to remember Soundhound claimed (and maybe still claims) to be able to work not only on recorded music, but when you whistle/hum/sing a song. I never had much luck with that, but that could be because of my lack of musical talent. What Soundhound does these days that Shazam doesn't (I think; I haven't actually tried Shazam in a long time) is that it displays lyrics for many songs, and is often able to synchronize those lyrics with where you are in the song.
- Symbiote 3y agoShazam has shown synchronized lyrics for many years.
- roelschroeven 3y agoThanks for the correction.
- hbs18 3y agoOn iPhones you can add a Shazam-powered music recognition quick toggle which acts just as you described.
- Moldoteck 3y agoGoogle raised it to another lvl: Now playing feature, so it constantly detects songs and will register them in a history log, and you can also search songs in google assistant by just humming (not working reliable but sometimes it nails it)
- bobbylarrybobby 3y agoIf anything it's gotten even more magical. I was blown away when I tried to find the song someone was singing on America’s Got Talent and the result it returned was the singer on AGT (they index tv shows!?).
- papichulo4 3y agoAh, I thought they did this to know what people are watching. Yes... see here: > Alphonso's software uses the same technology that Shazam and similar services employ to automatically detect the song you're listening to. It samples small bits of audio, creating a digital "fingerprint" of it, and comparing it against a a database on their server to identify the show or movie. In fact, Alphonso's CEO says they have a deal with Shazam, and use their specific technology to do this. But this embedded software can even be listening even when your phone's screen is turned off and it's ostensibly idle.
- matter_and_mind 3y agoI worked at Alphonso, and yes their tech also used small fingerprints made of small bits of audios. But they primarily used it in TV's to figure out what ads people are watching and then used that data for retargeting users on digital platforms.
- al_borland 3y agoI haven’t seen a commercial in quite a long time, but for a while many years ago, Shazam was being used like an audio QR code. Commercials would tell you to use Shazam on their ad to get a deal or something. My guess is after Apple bought Shazam they stopped needing to do stuff like that to monetize.
- cool_scatter 3y agoOh wow, I forgot all about that. That was a strange trend.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TillE 3y agoFor the technically knowledgeable, music fingerprinting is a concrete problem which is understandable but pretty difficult if you get into the details without looking at how other people have already solved it. It fits into that space of an unusual but comprehensible problem, unlike superficially similar features like recognizing animals or objects in images, which is mostly weird ML magic.
- hunter2_ 3y agoI would say animals in images is more akin to matching two different musical performances of the same song (where one of the two can even be the user humming), which Shazam doesn't offer but some systems like Google Assistant do! Rather, matching two recordings of the exact same performance (one ingested by Shazam at training time and one ingested by Shazam at run time) is more akin to identifying individuals (facial recognition) than identifying species.
- loxias 3y agoIt was really hard to do the first time. :) I'm honored to have been part of the first team to do any viable acoustic music recognition, in 2001 (much earlier than Shazam, a point of pride of course[0]). You're dead on that it's pretty difficult if you don't benefit from others, we did a ton of work that in retrospect wasn't necessary. I liked the advanced psychoacoustic model, faithfully implemented in high performant C direct from Zwicker. (Psychoacoustics). To a first approximation, about 10/s model -> pca -> top 16 dim -> VQ and the resulting bytes contain more than 50% of the entropy (!!) Shove all of those in a home grown what-you-now-call-a vector DB, do dozens of range queries, and search for any song common to multiple results. Boom, music recognition. Understandable in retrospect but things like that aren't Everest they're like... multiple unclimbed mountains. 0. And far too early to have any applications. Company existed 2000-2001 \o/
- garrettgrimsley 3y agoLooks like others, including Shazam, beat you to the punch in 2000: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7853664B1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US7853664B1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US6941275 https://patents.google.com/patent/US6941275 Very interesting hearing about all of the differing approaches people have taken to solving this problem! Do you have further writings on this topic?