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Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

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Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#262
I really enjoyed working at Shazam. One of my favourite parts were the hackdays, got to learn a lot. Here's a write up of visualising music recognitions: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/data-visualisation-with-1-bi...

I've been planning to do more write-ups from past hackdays, such as building a functional Shazam experience in client side JavaScript and other visualisations. For example one time, I repurposed a WebGL globe to plot music recognitions over it. I don't have access to the Shazam tag stream anymore, but you can get a feel for how this looked as I've applied near real-time Wikipedia edits on the globe instead: https://umaar.com/globe/

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for who you're replying to, but I find myself using it at restaurants, bars, and public locations where music is playing, as well as friends' cars, and other social gatherings. I know these sort of situations are rare for the average HN user.

They're also rare for anyone over 30 to care about (if not the situations themselves, what some random soundtrack to them is). Give it time...

Yup. I too completely lost interest in music when I hit 30

/s

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#265

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 mean, it's never worked for me even once that I can recall. I've mostly tried to identify music playing in commercial spaces (retail, cafes, etc) via Siri and I don't think it's ever given me an answer.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#266

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…

I agree with the lauding of Shazam, but I am interested in your statement "I use it almost daily" -- what for? I've always viewed Shazam as a novelty and have installed and uninstalled it a few random times, but as Jobs would say it seems like a feature not a product.

I don't use Shazam since I have a Pixel 2 that does the same thing in the background, but I use track recognition every day to automatically populate a Spotify playlist with all the music it recognizes throughout the day. It's really nice to have a playlist to scroll back through when I find myself asking "what was that cool song I heard yesterday?”

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#267
post #128

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…

Philips had similar technology that predates Shazam. That said, Shazam's algorithm scales better as they use "combinatorial hashing". This coupled with the fact they can up the hashes in a key-value table makes them better.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a DJ constantly looking for tracks to add to the collection. I listen to streaming music pretty constantly. For individual tracks with all of the metadata, the artist/track name info is provided. For listening to other DJ mixes, you just get the DJ name and mix name. Shazam tells me the specific track. I also use My Shazams as a potential mix list. If I have an item in My Shazams, it caught my attention for some r…

> As a DJ constantly looking for tracks to add to the collection. I listen to streaming music pretty constantly. For individual tracks with all of the metadata, the artist/track name info is provided. For listening to other DJ mixes, you just get the DJ name and mix name. Shazam tells me the specific track. So a pretty narrow demographic for the feature though...

>So a pretty narrow demographic for the feature though...

If you're only going to take one person's usage then, yeah, I guess it's pretty narrow. How about another example for from the same person. As a video editor I'm constantly having to find "hip/trendy/cool" music for video edits. These clients typically like music that I do not normally listen to, but I know it's something they would like when I hear it. I'll let it live in My Shazams until one day I need to find something. I've impressed more than one client with the ability to pull out a "fresh" song for them. Clients appreciate that sort of thing.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This "feature not a product" belief only makes sense if you pretend that the product doesn't provide the answer sought by its primary user It also makes sense if the scope of the product is not enough for it to make anyone pay for it (except as part of a larger product).

People don't pay for social networks either.

And you give away privacy as a result.
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