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Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

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Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#271

Post by on_and_off »

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.

Soundhound is pretty great too !

I have worked on integrating a shazam like library inside an app. We have looks at more than 12 solutions before finding a company with a song recognition library good enough to be called shazam like. It is by no mean a small feat you can reproduce during a weekend.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#272

Post by briandear »

coldtea wrote: post #225
alfredmuffin wrote: post #92

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...

By 30, I had already committed every song to memory so I no longer needed Shazam.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#273

Post by drakenot »

The journal article by the Shazam creators titled, "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm"[0], was one of the first CS papers I ever read. It was very easy to follow and I remember even making a personal utility that implemented their algorithm.

[0] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#274

Post by pavlov »

Razengan wrote: post #254
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.

This wouldn't be the first time that Apple releases an SDK, decides internally it's actually not something they want to support, and then just leaves it languishing in a semi-broken state because it would be too much trouble to cancel it outright.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#275

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#276

Post by dotdi »

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 audio fingerprinting[1], so no ML/AI in the core feature.

------

[1]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#277

Post by kabes »

Incerto wrote: post #69

A great app that PRE-DATES smart phones. I remember using Shazam when it was a dial in service (dial 2580 in the UK), hold your old brick mobile phone up and you would get a txt message a minute later with the song. Seemed like magic then and still does now.

I remember coca-cola did a large marketing campaign in some parts of Europe with them somewhere before the first iPhone (or at least before smartphones were common).

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#278

Post by starpilot »

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…

SoundHound is much better.

Re: Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam

#280

Post by donarb »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #25
josh2600 wrote: post #7

It’s weird to think that I would find it strange if Apple acquired a company like Shazam and left the ads on, isnt it? In a day and age when all of their competitors are turning to ads to increase revenues, Apple is making great customer experiences ad-free. I think the idea that making Shazam ad-free “makes sense” is actually fascinating because if it were google or amazon buying Shazam, I would assume it would rema…

It's hardly "littered" though. I use Shazam a lot and always found the ads very unintrusive. It is good news that they're going completely ad-free however.

Not just ad-free, but free now as well. Shazam had a free tier and you could pay to get rid of ads.
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