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Audio Fingerprinting Via Cell Phones
aruil writes: "MSNBC has a story reporting on yet another audio fingerprinting application. Next year, Royal Philips Electronics will begin selling licenses to allow users to identify songs using their cell phones. Similar technology has already been open-sourced in FreeAmp, which uses the Relatable engine."
It seems kind of hopeless for all these companies and the audio fingerprinting. About a year and a half ago some company came out with a similar idea, except is was a separate device and you would have to wait until you got home and connect it to your computer. And it only worked with 2 radio stations. Obviously this idea was found to be a dud rather quickly. So now you can get the same information with a cell phone, this wouldn't by any chance be easier than actually calling the radio station and asking them what's playing? The only really effective method I've seen to do this are those giant billboards by the freeway with the screen that tells you what song is playing.
And what about the distortion this will cause in the audio? It's not like FM radio is great quality, but embedding some sort of watermark/fingerprint that only requires 3 seconds of playback has got to have some sort of negative impact on the sound.
Anyway, what the hell is up with all these trolls tonight? Time to start browsing at +2 now I guess.
The future isn't what it used to be.
I'm impressed if the service really does accurately identify songs after only 3 seconds, and any 3 seconds of a song. Presumably you'd need to fingerprint second or two chunks of every song to have this capability. This is quite different from what I understand Relatable does, which is to fingerprint the first 30 seconds of a song, meaning a song can only be identified after 30 seconds, and only the first 30 seconds.
Fast Search & Transfer has developed a "whistle sreach". Just whistle a few notes from the song you want, and their searchengine finds the songs mathcing.
I have tried it and can confirm it works really well.
Story from newscientist.com here. (cache)
Also a article from GEMENI here.
Including metadata in a digital stream is trivial, and radio should go digital soon enough. (There is not enough room for all the would-be radio stations to broadcast in the scant airwave real estate the way it is parceled now, but digital broadcasting would make more room for reluctant web-based radio stations.) Soon, the only non-digital (and therefore non meta-tagged) music will be stored in the brain. As others have stated, technology that can only identify playback isn't really that useful, but a program that could identify a song by a few hummed or whistled notes would be Really Cool.
As a musician, I value authenticity and would love to have an app that would prevent my brain from tricking me into thinking I had composed a remembered melody. Also, many people would love to know what that song stuck in their head is. However, is this enough consumer interest to sustain such a product? Furthermore, is there a chance that copyright lawyers will get out of control with this kind of power?