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Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

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Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#111

Post by throwawayfinal »

amelius wrote: post #79
throwawayfinal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easy part? If you're apple, google, or microsoft, maybe.

Can you explain? I mean, you can easily find thousands of hours of music online. Recording background noise is easy (just go to a random bar where they are not playing music). Now simply add the two signals (you can shift them randomly to generate more data). You can also add some linear filtering if you like (just imagine random settings of an equalizer for starters). This should give you enough data to build a proo…

For training:

Illegally grabbing thousands of hours of music to train a commercial model hardly qualifies as fair use. Any company you build upon that would be tainted.

For sustaining:

In addition, you'll need to keep an updated catalog of music to identify new songs against, and most uses of a service like shazam are to find names of songs people aren't familiar with, so that catalog needs to be very fresh.

That means you'll have to grab some sort of feed, and engage in large scale music piracy for commercial gain or have access to a library of songs from many disparate music providers, such as ascap.

Background noise:

there are literally hundreds of different background noise environments you need to train against. Dozens of common microphone configurations. Clipping, variations.

It's very much a problem where a proof of concept is neat but doesn't really get you anywhere.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#112

Post by throwawayfinal »

throwawayfinal wrote: post #111
amelius wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain? I mean, you can easily find thousands of hours of music online. Recording background noise is easy (just go to a random bar where they are not playing music). Now simply add the two signals (you can shift them randomly to generate more data). You can also add some linear filtering if you like (just imagine random settings of an equalizer for starters). This should give you enough data to build a proo…

For training: Illegally grabbing thousands of hours of music to train a commercial model hardly qualifies as fair use. Any company you build upon that would be tainted. For sustaining: In addition, you'll need to keep an updated catalog of music to identify new songs against, and most uses of a service like shazam are to find names of songs people aren't familiar with, so that catalog needs to be very fresh. That mea…

Also, I'm not saying it's impossible or not worth doing (obviously, it's possible and worth doing), just that a few minutes of thinking and hacker news comments are going to hardly touch the breadth of difficulties required to get this to work even somewhat reliably.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#113

Post by ams6110 »

dsnuh wrote: post #62
wonderous wrote: post #24

>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the f…

I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

At that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#114

Post by wintercharm »

wonderous wrote: post #24

>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the f…

That's incredibly creative, getting around the limitations of flip phones.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#115

Post by dsnuh »

ams6110 wrote: post #113
dsnuh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

At that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.

Pretty sure they had the algorithm first.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#116

Post by tmalsburg2 »

wintercharm wrote: post #114
wonderous wrote: post #24

>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the f…

That's incredibly creative, getting around the limitations of flip phones.

That's how you see it today. But back in the day people probably thought, wow, look how creatively they are using the incredible capabilities of modern phones.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#117

Post by X86BSD »

eat_veggies wrote: post #105
ryanSrich wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I thought Apple completely killed Spotify. I personally had to switch because Artists started doing exclusives with Apple only and I really couldn't justify Spotify over Apple Music, even though I much preferred Spotify's experience. I've also noticed Apple's catalogue is much larger than Spotify's. Is Spotify getting better? I'd love to switch back.

I haven't used apple music before, but spotify's ml recommenders are really impressive, and most of my favorite songs and artists were recommended to me via its "discover weekly" playlist. Its apps are super slick (cross device play/control is really handy!), especially compared to itunes. Just buy a month of premium ($10/month or $5 if you're a student) and try it.

Yeah I agree with this. Spotify is a good experience. Save one. Their security is shit. After having my account hacked for the unpteenth time I finally threw in the towel since they clearly are not interested in securing their damn service and jumped to Apple Music. The UI is not as good as Spotify but I don’t worry about my account being hacked every week and their catalog is bigger at Apple Music. My wife found some obscure ass Pakistani tune she loved since she was a kid in Delhi. That was hardcore. Spotify never had much desi stuff.

I hope Spotify fixes their security woes. Either way I have no reason to leave Apple Music now.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#118

Post by sp332 »

dsnuh wrote: post #62
wonderous wrote: post #24

>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the f…

I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

Around 2000, MIT had a number you could dial (toll-free) and ask a computer about the weather. It would keep track of where and when you were talking about during the conversation, so after asking "will it rain in Boston today" you could ask "how about Thursday" and then "how about Rochester, NY" and it would read you Thursday's forecast for Rochester. A very cool end-to-end demo of conversational tech.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#120

Post by guelo »

ams6110 wrote: post #113
dsnuh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

At that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.
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