Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#251

Post by 3pt14159 » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

cannam wrote: post #128

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.

I 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 taki…

I was surprised that they didn't use a Jaccard distance when I looked into the paper, but I never really tested out why their more complicated method was required. The core insight (that note timing / beat is a fingerprint) is money, but the rest of the math seemed unnecessarily complicated.

Would really be interested if someone has tried other approaches and can comment.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#252

Post by bogomipz » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

Apple Music's recommendation and discovery is pretty abysmal. I guess this will fix that issue. I'm amazed at how bad it given they know the standard that has been set by their competitor Spotify.

When Apple acquired Beast we heard about how Jimmy Iovine and Dre were going to bring their understanding and expertise to Apple's music service. This now seems to have been a lot of bluster though. Apple had such a head start with iTunes, missed the boat with streaming, spent a fortune on Beats and finally seemed to be getting serious about their streaming music offering. And the product has been somewhere between underwhelming and "just OK."

It's interesting to see that Apple's solution is to just buy their way out of their discovery problem. For a company with unlimited resources and great design skills it's strange that Apple is not really good at building services.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#253

Post by fnord123 » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

spanishgum wrote: post #239

fnord123 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. This looks to me like an acquihire for the ML/AI/DL talent. So basically, yes they will be diverted to other projects.

Is Shazam really ML/AI/DL? I thought it was more of a signal processing and search engine system. You transform snippets of audio signals into text, pump it into a distributed database, and then perform a search against that. Maybe there is some AI involved in noise reduction, but that seems like a rather small component.

They do something that gets results. It doesn't matter if it's ML, AI, DL, linear regression, or just fingerprint+cosine similarity. There's some talent for getting some complex shit done.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#254

Post by Razengan » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #56

Hopefully they'll rewrite Shazam's Apple Watch app using the private first-party APIs so that it actually works rather than randomly crashing 50% of the time. The state of third-party apps on the Watch is awful. It usually takes 10 seconds for an app to start on a Series 2, and sometimes they just get stuck on that loading screen. If you manage to get an app running, the UI library has ridiculous bugs like accidental…

If they "truly" didn't want third parties on the Watch "at all" they wouldn't have released the watchOS SDK or made it possible to write, build and publish watch apps on the App Store.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#255

Post by vasco » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

fnord123 wrote: post #90

bluetidepro wrote: post #8

Shazam is the one app that has been around since about the birth of the iPhone that honestly still blows my mind in it's capabilities. The fact it can so quickly figure out any song in so many environments is incredible. Call me simple, but I use it almost daily, and it is accurate close to 98% of the time. I absolutely love Shazam's iOS app, and they have done a great job keeping up with UI/UX treads for it over the…

>With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. This looks to me like an acquihire for the ML/AI/DL talent. So basically, yes they will be diverted to other projects.

What ML/AI? This is fourier transforms and some nice UX.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#256

Post by justifier » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:54 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.

even 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...

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#257

Post by philers » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

mrleiter wrote: post #103

I once read in an article (that I unfortunately can't find right now) that the the worth of Shazam lies in the fact that it can recognise, which songs are trending. The value chain is approximately like this: 1)New song is released 2)It starts being "shazamed" by various people - it's becoming trendy 3)Large stores that differntiate themselves by being trendy want to play trendy songs first 4)They pay Shazam to tell…

The UK CEO presented some of their different data capabilities at the agency where I used to work: they were encouraging advertisers to use this data to soundtrack ads.

The different 'shazam'd songs were also connected to locations and user demographics so if you wanted a track that was going to be big in a specific community you could get a good guess.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#258

Post by hughes » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #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…

The always-on nature of this is the really killer aspect of it, especially when combined with the always-on OLED screen. If something is playing nearby I don't even have to touch my phone to know what it is - just a glance will tell me what's playing.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#259

Post by Razengan » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #66

Reedx wrote: post #54

I remember feeling that way the first time I used Uber (in SF where getting a taxi was difficult and unreliable). A few taps on my phone and a car shows up to my exact location in 2 minutes?! And that's it? No calling dispatch and hoping they'd show up eventually (sometimes they didn't). No fumbling with cash or tip or anything. It was like magic.

A shame that uber and the whole gig economy is so shit, circumventing basic employment rights and both minimum and living wages. I mean I like the basic idea and I agree that the taxi business needed the disruption, but it's opened the gates to people working well below a living wage because there's nothing else. That is, there's plenty of people that are willing to work below minimum wage because it's the only thing…

It's certainly better than nothing; for both riders/guests/users and the drivers/hosts/providers.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#260

Post by seymour333 » Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

I'm guessing this thing is going to run all the time and send Apple a continuous stream of what music is actually playing around people, so they can use the data to better market music.

Having song identification built into your iDevice is a nice value add for the consumer though