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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.
Bitzi (the "another" link in the article's "yet another" statement) isn't primarily an audio fingerprinting application. It's a file metadata catalog, audio fingerprints being just one sort of metadata collected. File metadata is keyed by a "bitprint" composed of two cryptographic hashes. The code for generating bitprints and contributing metadata to the catalog is in the public domain and the catalog itself is available for free reuse and redistribution under a dmoz-like license. Disclaimer: I work for Bitzi.
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.
There are different Britney Spears songs?
Gone are the methods of avoiding detection used to date.
Even if this detection has no way to discern between the original and a cover of the song, I can see the RIAA and major labels nailing a bunch of people, and using this system as proof.