How does Shazam work? • Hacker News Board

Re: How does Shazam work?

#41

Post by zevyoura » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

krustyburger wrote: post #18

thakoppno wrote: post #14

Perhaps obviously this is the same technique that enables ACR on TVs. It occurs to me that Shazam has such a better reputation online because the intent and consent of the user is honored. It makes me wonder if there couldn’t be an implementation on TVs that is similar and actually is a net positive for consumers. Basically would customers actually like TV ACR if the data wasn’t just going to sell more ads?

So the value-add would be the consumer would get to find out the name of the show or movie that’s playing, the same info that also pops up if they hit the pause button?

I find Youtube's watch history helpful, having that across everything I watched on my device would be even better.

Re: How does Shazam work?

#42

Post by shriracha » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

wrxd wrote: post #35

Tangential. This is a cool website, so cool that I tried to subscribe to it in my RSS reader… and it didn’t work. If any of the authors read this message, please consider adding a RSS feed and you’ve got a subscriber!

Thank you!

This has been on my list forever, finally added it today: https://perthirtysix.com/rss.xml

Re: How does Shazam work?

#43

Post by y1zhou » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

> On the flipside, this "fingerprint" approach is also what makes Shazam work poorly if you just sing into it. You're likely to generate different hashes than the original song, even if you are a very good singer! This is why newer, machine-learning-based systems are built to handle humming and singing, by matching on melody rather than exact frequencies.

So this is why singing/whistling a song to my phone never worked! I've always imagined the tech as some sort of wave pattern matching but the DFT is obviously more efficient for many scenarios. Cool article!