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Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

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Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#171

Post by kodablah »

jakobegger wrote: post #166
kodablah wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still blows my mind in it's capabilities. Just to jog people's memory, patent threats were sent to others doing similar things [0]. Not sure if that represents Shazam or not, but if so, they'll fit in perfectly with Apple. 0 - http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/

I thought Apple only went after big companies that copied their design? I've never heard of Apple threatening individuals in the Open Source community -- am I missing something?

> am I missing something?

Not particularly. With conditionals added, we can differentiate any behavior and pretend similarities don't exist.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#172

Post by emodendroket »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #76
emodendroket wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first experience with Uber made me so annoyed I e-mailed them to demand they delete my account, although I eventually tried it again.

Uber charges you for "wait time" after you request a car...which is insane. Not that Lyft is much better, but I've never seen that kind of nonsense with them.

In my case I stood there in the rain for 15 minutes waiting for a car that never came and eventually canceled, so I walked around till I got to a taxi stand. A little less than magical.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#173

Post by alfredmuffin »

Cyph0n wrote: post #160
Mononokay wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard about the concept of the "joke?" Novelty thing, I tell you. Admittedly, it might be a bit too recent of a concept for the average person to be aware of, especially with how radical it is. Here's a recent book of them, to help you get "in" on the "hip slang" of tomorrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philogelos

Have you heard of Poe’s law?

People like you take the fun out of this community

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#174

Post by gammateam »

S_A_P wrote: post #168

Shazam is one of those apps that has truly changed my life. I still remember as a teenager times where I heard a song on the radio or a mix show and missed the name of it. I have purchased entire albums thinking they had a song I liked and have been WRONG. Now I can let my phone figure it out over a noisy background like a bar or restaurant and it still knows what song I am tagging. This app is one that truly feels l…

Yes, Shazam has done a lot for genre, and diminishing the care for genre at all. Now for people that have spent way too much of their life defending or living a genre, what I mean is that it allows artists to be more creative and less pigeonholed, and it allows people to explore more of what they want.

People want certain sounds, and want more of that sound.

Shazam has been a key component of the discovery process.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#175

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

watty wrote: post #52
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 don't mean to take away from Shazam (because I too was amazed when I first used it) but the Pixel phones have Shazam-like ability built in which uses minimal battery and without internet... and it's constantly running any time music plays. Not really "magic" how it works but still pretty amazing that I can pull the phone out of my pocket any time I hear a song I like and immediately see the band/title.

Google used to have song identification via voice search and a widget on all Android phones since Lollipop. Then they killed it for no reason other than to screw over existing users. Widget is still there in Nougat but doesn't do anything.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#176

Post by tajen »

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…

Let’s hope it means their main patents expire circa 2022, which is not too far away.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#177

Post by diminoten »

colordrops wrote: post #42
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.

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

Google Play Music has a Shazam feature that's just as good (though I haven't rigorously tested it, it's never failed me), so lack of Android support is no real loss.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#178

Post by wrigby »

gnulinux wrote: post #107
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.

Ooook I don't want to be that guy, but if you take a signal processing course in a university, you'd see that algorithms that Shazam probably uses aren't blackmagic. In UC Berkeley one of the projects we did in our Linear Algebra class was doing something like Shazam; the input was a 5 seconds of a random song tuned down so much that human hear can barely hear and white noise added. Then the problem is matching this…

I only have a cursory knowledge of DSP, but it sounds like this was implemented by using the 5 second clip to build a matched filter kernel. This would require convolving the samples of the 5 second clip with the entire song to find out where it matches, which should work super well, but I think it would be really tough to scale this up to millions of songs. Is this how it was implemented?

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#179

Post by frenchman_in_ny »

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…

While I find Shazam to be amazing, I find SoundHound's capabilities even better in terms of identifying a song based on humming the tune or hearing a live version.

I was at a live jazz concert last night, and the trio started playing a riff on tune I recognized but couldn't exactly place. SoundHound nailed it (Sonny Rollins "Four"), while Shazam had no idea.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#180

Post by dopamean »

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…

My experience with shazam is that it finds about a quarter of the tracks I'm looking for. It's really really incredibly good at finding anything that airs on the radio or exists in spotify. But outside of that the results drop off quickly.
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