New Phone Service Promises to ID Songs

Coolnat2004 writes "Ever get a song stuck in your head, but you missed the DJ announcement of the song name? That's the idea powering a new cell phone-based service called 411-SONG. Just call 866-411-SONG, and hold your phone up to the speaker. 15 seconds later the call ends and the information on your song is displayed on your phone's screen. This comes at a price, though. 99 cents for your first 5 songs, and then 99 cents a song after that. However, nbc4.com reports that a subscription model may be coming soon. Wouldn't this technology be great for fixing up all those ID3 tags?"

Comments

Well

[pHatidic]

Wouldn't this technology be great for fixing up all those ID3 tags?

Well with google you can already do this for free. However, the catch is that you need good enough pitch to know what the notes are. But if you can get them (or close enough), then you can type them in to get the song.

Re:Been there, done that ....

[Nasarius]

No. MusicBrainz uses fingerprinting of the waveform (a kind of one-way hash, so it doesn't store the actual music). I find the track length on ripped songs usually varies by a few seconds anyway, so the exact length is really only useful in identifying the original CDs, which MusicBrainz can also do.

In my experience, it works fairly well and only gets confused when the same recording has been released on multiple albums ("best of", remasters, etc).