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Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

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Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#61

Post by gonehome »

spike021 wrote: post #13

I've used Shazam for years but lately for some reason I've been running into more music that it can't identify from two separate phones (so it's not possibly a bug limited to one device). Hoping this doesn't mean there service is degrading because I've really benefited from it over the years.

My issue with it was that it got too good.

I used to use it to identify music in shows or soundtracks, but it started just saying "Breaking Bad Episode 4" which while more accurate was less helpful.

Shortly after that everyone else had music discovery natively anyway.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#62

Post by dsnuh »

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.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#64

Post by neinzero »

neves wrote: post #17
indy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only store a catalog of the most popular songs. (Where 'most popular' is determined by your geographical location). This catalog is periodically updated.

Isn't the use case to find obscure music? Weird to have just popular ones. To "discover" a top 10 hit I can just ask someone nearby.

Top 10, yes, but not top 10,000.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#65

Post by xapata »

amelius wrote: post #42
dawnerd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more curious to see you try to build this in an afternoon. Also, it works a lot better than being able to find "slightly distorted" versions. It can catch a song in a noisy room where you can barely make out the song to begin with. Couple months back it found a song when there was a very loud crowd yelling over it. They're also able to determine differences between versions of songs pretty well. Some remixes m…

(removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)

> (removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)

I think describing the reaction as lack-of-appreciation is a bit misleading. Perhaps disbelief might be a better description.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#67

Post by amelius »

rhizome wrote: post #46
amelius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done. Well, you could translate the music into actual notes (or musical intervals), and use Smith-Waterman (or any more advanced and more recent technique) to find the song with the lowest edit-distance.

Converting digital audio to notes is both not as easy as it sounds and not how Shazam works. https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...

Yes, you can look at the frequency with the highest intensity in the FFT. This is the "dumb" version of converting music to notes (and is what I really intended to say but didn't choose to for sake of brevity).

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#68

Post by paxy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #47
rjett wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question from a non-Silicon Valley professional: Where does all that money go? Obviously, some [likely big] portion of it is still on the balance sheet, but does an app like Shazam really cost that much in engineering talent to update it and iterate it and server space to keep it running?

It varies quite a bit from company to company. They were founded in 2001 so I expect most of it was salary and physical plant. The business is/was connecting resale opportunities to brands and artists[1] so you'll have a fairly significant sales and marketing effort although typically you will pay sales people for performance so their compensation will track revenue. But to give you some things to think about, if you…

For a company with offices in the most expensive cities in the world $120K is likely closer to the starting salary than the median.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#69

Post by amelius »

vedant wrote: post #55
amelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)

This is a heap of nonsense. Not only does this summarily dismiss the enormous challenges in digital signal processing required for removing arbitrary background audio, it exposes some confusion associated with the ideas of correlated random variables, inner products, and affine transformations.

> it exposes some confusion associated with the ideas of correlated random variables, inner products

Read this article, then come back: [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#70

Post by amelius »

xapata wrote: post #65
amelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)

> (removed explanation because it seems not appreciated) I think describing the reaction as lack-of-appreciation is a bit misleading. Perhaps disbelief might be a better description.

For the wrong reasons. See my response.
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