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What do you bet they use a program to scour the net with the Shazam engine (or something like it), detect the music content, and automatically generate a form based takedown notice. All without ever needing a first person review.

It was a phone number you could call (at least in the uk http://www.shazam.com/music/web/pages/2580.html) long before the iPhone even existed.

Yeah, there definitely aren't any iPhone apps that have made it to other app stores (or vice versa). Nope, nope nope.

Apple supports both C and C++. If you design your app properly the porting isn't so bad in either direction. Yes, it's a bit harder than making your crappy Flash animation play on whatever. So sad.

Exactly how is this proverbial scanning software supposed to tell the difference between an illegal file and a legitimate one? Based on file name? Based on hash? Easily defeated and ineffective. The only way to truly tell if a file is infringing is to have a Turing complete artificial intelligence to watch it, listen to it, read it, or play it. Nothing short will do. Since websites hosting questionable content are having such difficulty separating out the files when forced to we can only conclude that Turing quality AI is not available yet. So, although the design specs call for a magic wand none are available.

Actually, there's an app for that

I was referring to our own work on using neural networks for pattern recognition in images.

The research we were doing was in fact prompted by the well-documented success of neural networks in other nonlinear problems. One of the very first good examples of an applied adaptive neural network was in the standard modem of the time, which used a very small neural network to optimize the equalizer settings on each end.

Neural nets appear to have a lot more success with constructing nonlinear maps from subsets of Rn to Rm with n and m relatively small. Vision is not such a case as the input space n is very large. Once n and m get large you will require an exponentially large number of training samples, with the increased risk of falling into local minima (mitigated by simulated annealing or tunneling). In addition, if there is any inherent linearity in the problem an old-school Kalman filter may be less sexy but more useful.

Many of the success stories of neural nets are really of the "Stone Soup" variety, in which the neural network is the "Stone" and the meat-and-potatoes real work is in how to preprocess the data to reduce the dimensions n and m. One of the most amazing (non-neural) pattern-recognition apps that I have seen recently is the Shazam technology, which can identify a recorded song from 30 seconds of a (noisy) snippet. Their dimension-reducing logic involves hashes of spectrogram peak pairs. No neural nets to be seen, but absolutely brilliant and points to ways that similar things could be done in the visual domain.

Really?? that's incredible!!!
http://www.shazam.com/music/web/pages/iphone.html
BTW 2d and URL BC scanning apps are also available for the iPhone.

And another one bites the RDF.

(1) The iPhone heavily features transitions to make the UI look sexy. Try focusing on real usability issues such as the lack of tactile feedback for typing and, you know, dialing.

(2) "Level" is a simple application of the iPhone's accelerometer; you're an idiot if you try to use it for any applications which require accuracy to 1/10th of a degree.

(3) Shazam has been available through the Java app ShazamiD (hint: click "phone compatibility) for ages. As a fallback, dial 2580 (in the UK).

(4) "And it's an iPod". An iPod is an MP3 player. So are most phones. What sets the iPod apart is the click wheel. The iPhone doesn't have one.

Yup it's been around for a while now... it's called SHAZAM.

In a nutshell, you dial 2580 when you're out, and then when the service gets a match it hangs up and texts you back the name & artist of the song. Quite neat.

I wonder how well this will actually work.

The technology works surprisingly well on a cell phone. One of the guys I work with in the UK showed me Shazam. I picked a random track from his vast MP3 collection, he dialed a number and held out his phone for a half a minute, and shortly thereafter they SMS'ed him the artist. Not a quite background either...

http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/sp/s/media-type /html/user/anon/page/default/template/what_is_tagg ing/music.html

Take that same technology and do it on what should be even cleaner audio than what you send over a cell phone speaker - I suspect they could get most of it.

1) It doesn't have to be particularly accurate, and false positives don't matter either. If they're not sure, Myspace will block it.
2) 15-20 secs *is* enough to identify stuff. I have no relation to this company, but as I said, in the UK there's a service called http://www.shazam.com/music/portal that does exactly this - hear a song in a club or on the radio, ring a premium rate number on your mobile, hold the phone up so it can hear the song, and 20 secs later it will cut off: 10 seconds later you'll have a text message with the track name, artist and a link to where you can buy it. It's a waste of money, but it *does* work, I've done it. If you're in the UK, you can try it now at a price...

Wake me up when they invent a USB dongle that records FM broadcasts and then uses a Shazam-like service to identify and tag songs automagically.

This sounds and looks like it will technically work with the same priciple as shazam. Shazam is a music tagging service - you dial a number on your mobile phone (in the uk) the service samples 30 seconds of music and a few seconds later texts a message back to you to advise what the song was

http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/sp/s/media-type /html/user/anon/page/default/template/what_is_tagg ing/music.html

explains a bit more

Just like Shazam - http://www.shazam.com/music/portal - dial 2345 from your phone, hold it to the speaker, receive the text title of the song and an option to purchase it as a ringtone or song.

t

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/23/222925 5&tid=141&tid=126
http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/5393. html

Maybe it's possible that Yahoo's going to do some sort of tie-in with Shazam (v useful service, especially when a song's niggling you).

A service like this has been in the UK for well over a year. It's 2580 and costs about the same I think.

URL: http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home

Shazam in the UK has done this for years. You just dial 2580 from any mobile and get the id sent to you as a text message.

There's even a web site with an faq:

http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/help_faqs_tagging

Have fun music lovers!

http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home

This type of service been available in the uk for a few years now with shazam, it works reasonably well for currently popular songs, fairs a bit oddly with some older stuff though.

I have actually used it for mp3 tagging too :)

http://www.shazam.com/ will do that for you...

It was idiotic even trying to launch this thing in the USA. Carriers have a strange-hold over this market. Nokia has a range over over 100 handsets - you can buy about 6 of these on US carrier contracts, not including decent phones with WLAN and Bluetooth.

I cannot understand why Apple is sodding around with Motorola on this. They should have partnered with Nokia.

As an aside, Apple should also partner with Shazam. The best thing that an iPod/phone combo could do is recognize music from an online database and buy it for you.

is standard barcodes and we could do price comparisons in the same way that shazam tags recorded music.

Imagine sending a picture of a barcode to ebay to see if there's an auction for that item running.

In the UK there is something similar, called Shazam. Which works surpisingly well.

We have something like that in the UK called Shazam.

Just dial a number on your mobile phone, hold it up to the speaker while the tune you want ID'd is playing and it'll SMS you back shortly with the track name and artist. You can then log onto the Shazam website, enter in your mobile number and you get a list of all the tracks you've searched for along with links to an Amazon search so you can purchase the track.

Pretty good for ID'ing tracks when you're in a club and can't get to the DJ to hassle him. :P

I haven't used that re5ult system, I have however used shazzam in a pub quiz to identify those snippets of songs in name the track / artist rounds :)

Maybe so, but it's been available here in the UK for about a year or 18 months now. Dial 2580 (conveniently, the middle column of numbers on most mobile keypads), hold phone to speaker, and it identifies the music. I've used it even in nightclubs etc., and it's pretty much spot on.

Shazam

I wonder if AT&T have licenced technology from shazam. More about their technology here.

In the UK at least

Then prepare to be amazed!

I've been using the same tech here in the UK for the past year and it really does work. Most of the stuff I listen to is not chart stuff, I didn't believe it would be all that good but, yes it really is.

When you'd kill for the name of the song and your mates don't know it, then its great to just dial 2580 and direct your phone's mic towards the nearest speaker. Shazam then sends you a text of the name of the song and you can access a list of all your songs on the Shazam website. It costs 59p here which is ~99c.

For those suggesting that you should be able to get a song with your purchase; Shazam let you get a ringtone (mono or polyphonic) just after you get the name of the track. I haven't used this yet so can't commment on it.

As for its accuracy I've only once had a problem with it and that was because I was in a club with very bad audio and decided to basically 'test' Shazam out. There was a part of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Sprirt that didn't sound anything like it should - just a lot of high pitch noise. Shazam couldn't work it out, so I got my next song name or 'tag' for just 9p.

You will be suprised by this service.

As some others have said, this technology has been around for a while now. Shazam were (iirc) the first to offer it in the UK. They charge 59p or about the same 99 cents. The Shazam service was covered in Scientific American in June 2003 and has been mentioned on /. a few times in the last year.

You can do this already! Hurrah!

Its called Shazam and its been available for at least a year now. From what I've tried of the service, it works quite well.

Cost is 59pence per call (which must be about 35 cents or something in US of A money).

Reckon this is the service mentioned
http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home

Well, here in the uk we have shazam, where you hold your phone up to a speaker and the system texts you back the name of the song.

Also, I remember hearing about a system a guy developed based on a higher-lower note pattern identification process. Basically, it keeps asking you "is the next note higher, lower or the same as the last?". Apparently you only had to do this about 10 times on average to identify a unique song.

You can then go to the above web site and buy the music you played down the phone. It's stunningly and sometimes disturbingly accurate. It's recognised every piece of music I've played at it, even the theme tune from "The A-Team". I don't know where they get their database from, but it's massive.

In the UK there is a service called Shazam. You dial 2580 on your mobile, hold the phone up to the music source and 20 seconds late the call will automatically end.

After about 30 seconds, it'll send you a text message with the name of the track and the artist.

Provided the music source isn't tainted too much (ie. you're near it and there isn't something else loud in the background) and isn't too obscure, then it does pretty well.

It costs about 9p for the call and 50p for the text message. Best to check on their website.

In the UK there is a service called Shazam. You dial 2580 on your mobile, hold the phone up to the music source and 20 seconds late the call will automatically end.

After about 30 seconds, it'll send you a text message with the name of the track and the artist.

Provided the music source isn't tainted too much (ie. you're near it and there isn't something else loud in the background) and isn't too obscure, then it does pretty well.

It costs about 9p for the call and 50p for the text message. Best to check on their website.

The question of whether this is good or not is really the question of where the balance of power between the artist and the consumer should be.

On the one hand, artists should be compensated for their work. So an ideal music format would make that happen.

On the other hand, the consumer should be able to "try before they buy", make backups, cross formats, lend it, print it out and feed it to their dog, apply stupid filters in Cool Edit, and generally play with it however they want. An ideal music format would make this happen as well.

Can any format offer both? It seems not. To offer the user freedom, the file has to get unlocked at some point, and then P2P ensures it will get copied. Many artists will prefer the "get money" option, and the paying customers will be out of luck.

So, maybe the solution is to do something to P2P. This usually meets howls of protest, but there may be another way. Shazam. This is a neat service for when you hear a song and don't recognise it. Call them, point your phone at the speaker, and you get a text message back identifying the song. I think their tech could have other uses...

So, we have a Napster-like model with central servers, only your music now must pass the not-an-existing-tune test before being added. Record companies can supply the tags before a song is released, legitimate files get through, everyone's sort of happy.

Although you might prefer un-crippled files and un-crippled P2P, the Deep Pockets are going to try their hardest to stop you. Is this halfway position the best you can expect?

shazam.com provides this service, (well, the song identification part), in the U.K. but not yet in the U.S.

I hope it makes it to the U.S. soon. I know I'd use it.

Check out Shazam. They offer a unique service that does something similar to this.

What you want is Shazam - assuming you're in the UK that is! :-)

You dial a number, play a bit of music down the phone and you get an SMS message back identifying the artist and title, pretty nifty. It costs about 50p though. They add the "tagged" tracks to a personalised list on their site where you can buy them online and other neat stuff.

I know in the UK there is a service called Shazam which you call up with your mobile phone, point your phone at a 'music source' for around 15 seconds and then you get a text message/SMS back around 30 seconds later showing a) the artist name (handy for 'cover versions) and b) the track name. It also has the facility (if you register) to 'store' your requests on its website and give appropriate links to online music stores.
It seems to work quite alright as well, I tested it by playing 2 tracks at once out my speakers - it correctly identified one of them (I thought it'll fail complete), I've tried it via the radio on a bus - again success, admiteddly it failed in a very crowded and noisy nightclub - but it's still damn good (and resonable cheap) for identifying music.
The claim that they can recognise 1.5million different tracks from just a 15 second second sample - I don't know how they do it though, but I know *I'm* impressed by the technology!

I know in the UK there is a service called Shazam which you call up with your mobile phone, point your phone at a 'music source' for around 15 seconds and then you get a text message/SMS back around 30 seconds later showing a) the artist name (handy for 'cover versions) and b) the track name. It also has the facility (if you register) to 'store' your requests on its website and give appropriate links to online music stores.
It seems to work quite alright as well, I tested it by playing 2 tracks at once out my speakers - it correctly identified one of them (I thought it'll fail complete), I've tried it via the radio on a bus - again success, admiteddly it failed in a very crowded and noisy nightclub - but it's still damn good (and resonable cheap) for identifying music.
The claim that they can recognise 1.5million different tracks from just a 15 second second sample - I don't know how they do it though, but I know *I'm* impressed by the technology!

With regard to completely untagged MP3s. The technologies sort of here (www.shazam.com) for identifying music, but the delivery mechanism's all wrong for you, and the price isn't good either. I can see this sort of thing branching out in a short while though. You send a fifteen second MP3 snippet, and an email comes back to you with the song details.

How I'd do it. If you can get the CDDB into a MYSQL database, it'd be easy enough to strip out the id tag info and do some sort of an index match.

The Feedb CD Data can be found here