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SHAZAM..How the hell does it do that?

C

cenetti

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 30, 2008
464
47
This is like one of those WTF?!! moments for me...

I tried 10+ songs, every time, it told me what song I was playing...
:eek:

What's the technology behind this application?

I am officially impressed!

Just play a song, hold your iphone next to your speaker and in 10secs it identifies the song... whoa?!!
 
Cool, huh? Try midomi though. It's like the same thing except you can actually sing to it or hum the song and it will tell you. I haven't tested either of these because I will be getting my iPhone tomorrow of course but these will be great apps to use for sure!
 
Will apps like this function on the touch? I suppose not, but am not sure. Have yet to purchase the touch, nor have I been home yet today to download iTunes 7.7 to play with the app store. Does it even separate which apps will not work on the touch but will on the phone?
 
I'm impressed with Shazam as well. Out of the 10 or so songs that I tried, it got 8 of them. The two that it had trouble with were classical pieces. The others were rock, pop, jazz, and R&B. I guess I'll go into the settings and see if making the listening time longer will help at all.

I was skeptical about how well it would work at first, but now I think it's awesome!
 
Awesome! I was so upset when I found out the one from the jailbreak a while ago was no longer going to be in development due to licensing costs. Nice to know I'll have this app back.
 
it'd be good if it could then search the wifi itune store and let you buy it...
 
i thought you could get a song via shazam?

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/columns/paterson/story/0,,800257,00.html

Developments in audio pattern recognition mean that songs are given their own unique fingerprint. Hold up a mobile in a club or to the radio or TV and Shazam can check the 1.6 million songs it has on file. A text message naming the title and artist arrives within seconds. This technology has five patent applications; four were needed to detect variances in the work of Big Country.

Bit like audiobrainz - fingerprinting songs and getting their tags.
 
Basically, it transmits the audio in real time to a large call center type place overseas (70 cents an hour kind of place), where there are a bunch of workers who are very familiar with music and can recognize 90% of all songs instantly. There is a fail over, so if one person doesn't know the song, it rolls over to one of his colleagues, who very well may know it.

When these guys aren't handling song identifications, they subcontract to answer Dell Support phone calls. Need a hand with that wireless router?

okay, okay. its a joke.
 
newappleboy said:
Will apps like this function on the touch? I suppose not, but am not sure. Have yet to purchase the touch, nor have I been home yet today to download iTunes 7.7 to play with the app store. Does it even separate which apps will not work on the touch but will on the phone?
Click to expand...

Anyone...? I'm also at work and can't browse the iTunes which I have heard separates Touch apps from iPhone apps.
 
Shazam is pretty cool

I tried Shazam with two songs on youtube, and it identified both. I then tried the same two with Midomi, and it didn't identify either. I tried humming one of the songs to Midomi, and it didn't get that either.

The Shazam interface seems a bit cleaner as well.

That's my 2 minutes of testing. I don't know anyone who works for Shazam or anything. :)

Maybe the Midomi server's down or something?
 
while i know this is a forum for apple and the iphone and stuff this technology has been out for a while. Verizon has had this on some of their phones for nearly a year. It would listen to the song for 10 seconds and be able to tell you who plays it what CD its on and whats the name of the song. And then through their Vcast would then let you buy it in either ring tone format or full song version.

Now I dont know if this is better or worse then the VCast version Verizon has but it has been out for a while.

I used it but never really got to much of use out of it. But it was cool using it while i had Verizon before I bought my iphone. Ill prolly get this again and see how much I use it this time.
 
The recognition technology used by Shazam (www.shazam.com) is owned by Landmark Digital (www.landmarkdigital.com). It is a patented fingerprinting technology that recognizes practically any audio that is within the recognition database very quickly and with a very small amount of audio even under heavy noise. Shazam provides recognition services on phones and smartphones all over the world (and now the iPhone).

For the person who mentioned classical - classical is a huge library that is difficult to keep cataloged, which is likely the reason it wasn't picked up. Other genres should work very well.
 
Lee Fyock said:
I tried Shazam with two songs on youtube, and it identified both. I then tried the same two with Midomi, and it didn't identify either. I tried humming one of the songs to Midomi, and it didn't get that either.

The Shazam interface seems a bit cleaner as well.

That's my 2 minutes of testing. I don't know anyone who works for Shazam or anything. :)

Maybe the Midomi server's down or something?
Click to expand...

Yeah same experience here, I tried many songs with Midomi and it recognized only 1 out of the several I tried while the Shazam app has worked with every one I've tried.
 
Shazam

We have had Shazam for years over here in the UK, just dial a number then hold the phone up to the block rocking beat & get an SMS with the song details (for a small charge, no charge if the song is not tagged).

Nice to see it packaged up as an iPhone app though.
 
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