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Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

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Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#42

> 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.

You can bet they will kill integration with Spotify though. And maybe no more Android support. I'll take ads over that.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#43
post #32

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.

Sounds like the problem was your singing.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#44

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.

Yes 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.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#47

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.

Just as another data point, I've had the opposite experience. SoundHound doesn't work most of the time for me. My tastes are eclectic though.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#48
post #32

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.

To 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.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#49
I would love to see something like the Pixel's Now Playing feature come to Apple devices. If you haven't seen this, it periodically, passively listens for background music and displays the currently-playing song on the lock screen, using a local database of IIRC 20,000 songs. There's a paper about it (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...) – but I'd have to guess it's patented and we won't see it soon.
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