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Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

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Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#91

Post by amelius »

tsomctl wrote: post #83
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance. That's actually the easy part. You already have the music. Distorting it by superimposing background noise is really not difficult.

Lol. When you superimpose noise, the original data is still there. When you have a FM radio playing staticky, heavily compressed music through crappy speakers in an acoustically terrible store and being captured by a terrible microphone and then being compressed, a significant amount of nonlinear distortion has taken place. That is extremely hard to model. And you would have to model it or have real data to train a n…

> playing staticky, heavily compressed music through crappy speakers in an acoustically terrible store

I think you just confirmed how easy (and cheap) it is to actually generate this data.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#92

Post by zjaffee »

gorgonian wrote: post #27
kin wrote: post #23

I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.

Apple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.

It's odd that they didn't try to purchase soundhound then. The company has more evolved tech, and also has voice recognition services beyond just music through houndify.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#93

Post by beachy »

tsomctl wrote: post #83
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance. That's actually the easy part. You already have the music. Distorting it by superimposing background noise is really not difficult.

Lol. When you superimpose noise, the original data is still there. When you have a FM radio playing staticky, heavily compressed music through crappy speakers in an acoustically terrible store and being captured by a terrible microphone and then being compressed, a significant amount of nonlinear distortion has taken place. That is extremely hard to model. And you would have to model it or have real data to train a n…

If by "model" you mean reproduce, why is it so hard to simulate the distortion introduced by poor FM reception? Or by the acoustics of a store?

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#94

Post by d33 »

tsomctl wrote: post #83
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance. That's actually the easy part. You already have the music. Distorting it by superimposing background noise is really not difficult.

Lol. When you superimpose noise, the original data is still there. When you have a FM radio playing staticky, heavily compressed music through crappy speakers in an acoustically terrible store and being captured by a terrible microphone and then being compressed, a significant amount of nonlinear distortion has taken place. That is extremely hard to model. And you would have to model it or have real data to train a n…

I wonder if you could build a neural network that would do that...

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#95

Post by Aissen »

Probably a way to pay less taxes; they won't have to bring EU cash to US, and get to cash it out before Brexit.

It's also a nice acqui-hire; Spotify already snatched Echo Nest a few years ago, so they get to catch-up with Shazam.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#96

Post by rhizome »

amelius wrote: post #67
rhizome wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The thing is that the process looks for spectral patterns, let's call it "harmonic content per unit of time," not just notes. Mere notes would result in lots and lots of false positives.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#97

Post by objclxt »

paxy wrote: post #68
ChuckMcM wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of Shazam's engineering is in London. Going rates for engineers in London are way below the valley. Facebook/Google/Apple pay UK engineers about 30-40% less than their US counterparts.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#98

Post by kgilpin »

adventured wrote: post #38
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?

An average of 50 employees with their all-in costs for 18 years, including all the other routine business expenses = $143 million.

But presumably there was revenue.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#99

Post by amelius »

rhizome wrote: post #96
amelius wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The thing is that the process looks for spectral patterns, let's call it "harmonic content per unit of time," not just notes. Mere notes would result in lots and lots of false positives.

Let's just agree that the process is not too far removed from my initial brief description, and should be simple to implement, as the article shows. For any competent signal processing engineer, this should all be evident, which was the main point.

Also, even if you have many false positives, you have already narrowed down the search, and this allows you to do more brute-force searching like computing cross-correlations.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#100

Post by annexrichmond »

gorgonian wrote: post #27
kin wrote: post #23

I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.

Apple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.

What basis do you have for that? When they bought Workflow they didn't kill it.
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