Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#31

Post by busterarm » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21

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.

Maybe 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.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#32

Post by avip » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21

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.

Well 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.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#33

Post by scoot » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

Makes sense, since Shazam already powers the Siri "what song is this?" capability that links to iTunes.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#34

Post by lobo_tuerto » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

jonwachob91 wrote: post #28

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21

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.

>> 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)?

I 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...

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#35

Post by b_tterc_p » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

To anyone curious how Shazam works, it looks for similarity in the spectrogram of the music. This is not too different from how we identify certain chemical compounds with mass spectrometry.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#36

Post by bitwize » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

waterside81 wrote: post #11

jaequery wrote: post #5

Is this the same Shazam that was a torrent service back in the Napster days?

Are you thinking of Kazaa?

Really? I could have sworn Sinbad endorsed it back in the day...

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#37

Post by MrEfficiency » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #2

> The app will soon offer its experience ad-free for all users so everyone can enjoy the best of Shazam without interruption. Probably, one of the best results from this acquisition.

So how will Apple be Apple?

>Exclusive?

>Start charging money?

>Patents?

Not to mean that people shouldn't make money, but acquisition means that there will be change.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#38

Post by Timmah » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21

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.

It 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

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#39

Post by benatkin » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

Apple's first Android app?

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#40

Post by rezeroed » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

joelrunyon wrote: post #15

I like Shazam, but I love Soundhound. I've found it way more accurate and I also found their other audio tools through it. Such a cool company. Congrats to Shazam though!

Agreed. Shazam has failed for me too often where Soundhound has returned the result, that the only reason I use Shazam anymore is out of curiosity after Soundhound, to see if it can also find the track.