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Use pHash instead, my open source perceptual hashing library that can detect similar audio, video, images and text files. It does not use Shazam's patented algorithm, which isn't all that great anyhow.

This is known as a perceptual hash. We have a perceptual audio hash in pHash, my open source software project that will tell you how similar two media files are to each other. It also features an indexing system to find the best matches from a sample audio clip, a la Shazam. These algorithms are not new by any means, although this patent goes a bit further than simply matching audio samples.

Or you can simply use my wonderful open source library called pHash.

Their SHA1 hashing method will not be sufficient to detect most copyright infringements. Even one bit change in a file will result in a completely different SHA1 hash. I am the creator of pHash, which is well suited for this type of similarity search. The hashes do not need to be identical in order to detect duplicate or similar files, and similar files will have hashes that are "close" to one another. This is really what they should be using.

pHash will probably take care of that anyway.

This seems like a good time to pump my own open source project: pHash. pHash is a perceptual hashing library that computes hashes for audio, video and image files, with text and PDF hashing coming soon. We use an algorithm similar to YouTube's audio fingerprinting method but we do not only take into account the first 30 seconds. Although, it's impossible to tell from this basic test whether their algorithm truly only looks at the first 30 seconds, or if the algorithm considers them to be different audio files. If the song is only 1 minute in duration, and 30 seconds is blank, is that really the same audio file as the full 1 minute version? At some point the audio files are not really the same anymore, although the perceptual hashes should be somewhat close to each other. Please give pHash a try. We could use some feedback from the OSS community and would appreciate it greatly.

This seems like a good time to promote my new open source project, pHash. It is a perceptual hash library under the GPLv3 that will eventually be able to do all the things this commercial service does. Please join if you have DSP, digital imaging experience or strong mathematics background. We could use more volunteers!