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Yahoo! Launches Audio Search Beta
guaigean writes "Internet News is running a story on a new Yahoo! service titled Yahoo! Audio Search and it is currently in beta. The tool allows the searching of audio files and Yahoo! claims to have 50 million music, voice, and other files cataloged in the search. It searches across multiple mainstream music sites, as well as plenty of independent pages. Now if only it was tied in with some sort of lyric search."
Ok, Google and Yahoo! both have Video search.. but does Google have Audio search engine capabilities?
First innovation for Yahoo! since.. a long time ago.. or Google's imitation?
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
Hope that doesn't include *copyrighted* music files! Better watch your step there, Yahoo!
.. is a microphone and know how to humm..
There was a story the other day about Baidu.com was being sued for providing easy search access to copyrighted materials. This on the eve of their IPO.
If a company can be sued over it in China, where copyright restrictions are very lax, how successful will Yahoo! be in implementing this here in a country where copyrights are taken much more seriously?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
They actually encourage you to try a search on copyrighted materials (i.e. Coldplay), but if you do, it gives you a list of fee-based audio services where you can buy the song(s). No illegal stuff here, move along :).
Non-copyrighted materials have download links next to them.
I prefer archive.org, as a matter of fact, at least I'm certain what is under a Creative Commons licence there.
i know half way down with that link is an infringing file. Its a valid download.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Wow, I just tried to search for a song I've been trying to find for a little while with no luck in google, and bam first result there it was, free download.
If a company can be sued over it in China, where copyright restrictions are very lax, how successful will Yahoo! be in implementing this here in a country where copyrights are taken much more seriously?
Pretty successful. Have you actually tried it? It doesn't take you to illegal free copies, it provides links to copies to buy.
For instance, searching for a semi-obscure ambient band that I quite like turned up lots of hits. Selecting a track takes you to this page which tells you various places you can buy and download it. It's quite a nice service really - think of it as akin iTMS search that runs over multiple different major music stores and provides options, or Froogle for downloadable music. Excellent if you like hard to find music (that often isn't in CD stores) like myself, or even if you simply want to shop around (though 99c seems to be the rate pretty much everywhere, so comparison shopping is limited). I could definitely see this catching on.
Way to go Yahoo! you actually came up with someting interesting and new for a change.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
This just seems like Yahoo is on a trip to yet another FCC regulation debate. But starting a service like this is a good counter-action to google's successful products.
...song-identification based on me humming it into my computer's microphone.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Being a classical music geek, I am always skeptical, and i suppose somewhat jaded, in this world that worships the latest pop idol, so I said to myself, "yeah, we'll see about this" and popped into the search field the text from Walt Whitman, "Behold the sea" used by Ralph Vaughan Williams" in his first symphony. What do you know. It even even had a link to the apple i-tunes store which open itunes to the track. Next I tried "Ich habe genug" and not only did I get a handful of recordings of Bach's cantata BWV 82, it also found the recitative from the Magnificat. Thinking maybe it only indexed the titles, I tried some interior text from the cantata like "Mein Trost ist nur allein" and it still found it. This works much better than I expected. Cool.
This option is disabled by default. I'm getting the feeling that this seach might just be a marketing tool for some major labels. What do others think?
Like people who think that podcasting is like radio, unfortunately, the number of people that think bbcode is the same as HTML is also growing.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
My only problem with this service has to do with the songs you only can buy: Music is more often than not licensed region by region, country bycountry. This means that even if I find a song from iTMS here, it's quite possible I actually won't be able to buy it -- even though iTMS is available in my country.
Apart from this I think Audio Search is a great move from Yahoo. For once they've come with a search related service, that's not only a "me too" feature.
Aw. I was disappointed - I expected an audio search, not an audio metadata search.
I was wondering how their audio search would work.. Something like a recording interface expecting the searcher to hum, whistle or sing the song they are looking for..
"it goes Dum di doo di doo diddly dum"
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Don't call me, that's not what I mean !0 2830.stm
A few years ago, there was a service announced which would do this - just need to hand the result off to the search engine afterwards. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/22
Search results:
750,234 results found.
Hey look, most top 40 songs from the last 10 years. This is pretty handy!
It's right there in the freaking "Try this" box.
Were that I say, pancakes?
2 results found:
The Beatles - "I'm So Tired"
The Beatles - "She's Leaving Home"
There you go! Proof!
He's only pretending to make a post, in an effort to get his blog link on a highly trafficked site.
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).
Smegma.
Audio searching is not new - altavista has had this for years. That being said, Yahoo's version is actually pretty good. As a matter of fact, much of what Yahoo has done recently has been pretty cool - are they on their way back?
Underholdning.info
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/23/222925 5&tid=141&tid=126. html
http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/5393
Even the Wilhelm scream comes up empty :/
Oh if only. It is an unquestionable truth that when searching for lyrics on the interweb you are bound to pick up a piece of malware.
Google definitely gets lyrics for brand new songs. But I have trouble finding older songs using it.
Ever since the Inktome engine (which allowed one to search for files by extension) disappeared from HotBot that I've been looking for a replacement service. Thumbs up for Yahoo for this achievement, they have really beaten Google to it this time.
I wanted to find the song that is used on the Dave Chappelle show as his intro music (when he walks onto the stage). I managed to find an artist name and title, popped it into the yahoo audio search and the first result is a link to soundclick that has the song as a free stream to listen, or free mp3 download if you sign up.
I am impressed! :).
I play in a band. When searching for us using google, all kind of non-related stuff comes out also (as expected, btw). But with this engine, it displayed our soungs, and to amaze me a bit more, it also knew somehow, that we are unsigned
Anyway, I welcome this new feature and hope it gets popular!
Check us out btw, the band's name is Soterios.
Anyone else notice the submit page?
Seems you can put your own audio up there too using rss. which leads me to believe either two things will happen:
1) People will post free copies of comercial music and be blocked, or perhaps the service gets closed down.
2) New independant artists could use this as a launching platform.
What this really needs though is some sort of amazonesque, other people who liked this also like... and an ebay-esque method for people to be able to publish their own original music.
With those two things this could really help break the stranglehold the media companies have on the music industry.
Example, Gothic Power by Christopher Fields. I don't believe you can buy this anywhere but people have ripped it from various trailers. (variations were in FOTR and T3 trailers)
I am pretty sure other trailer music never intended for distribution is locatable with this service.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
which music format would you like? Something for Windows, or something for Windows, or maybe Windows or perhaps Windows? With *this* music search you have a *choice* see?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Where's the 'I'm feeling like a cheapskate bastard - show me the free stuff' button?
Now if only we could search easily within audio files, a la Podscope
RC.
Candygram for Mongo!
Yahoo! bought Inktomi a while ago. That might explain why Inktomi's name disappeared from all search engines, including Yahoo!'s.
For more information, click here.
Ok, go to the audio search beta page, under "Try these audio searches" click "horror scream", then pick the second reslult. If you go to the first webpage that it gives you, and go to the file that it points you to, you will get: "Number One: You can never have sex."
but most people have VHS.
What are you talking about?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Can't I use this Yahoo feature as a webservice, to search my own audio files? I search with text for an audio file in Yahoo. Yahoo finds it and identifies it. All I want is the MD5 sum, or some other unique hash. I'v already preindexed my own audio files, into a table of their hashes. I get just the Yahoo hash, without downloading (or violating copyright) the external found file. I look up the Yahoo hash in my table, and find my own file.
The essential link here is getting just the hash, rather than downloading the file. Which is much more efficient, and lets me use the value of the files I've already got. Is there a way to do just that?
--
make install -not war
How, exactly, is having a central search engine like Yahoo that can locate interesting audio content on other people's machines, with copyright and licensing issues being a between you and the person providing the content and none of Yahoo's business... ...different from having a central search engine like the original Napster or Audiogalaxy or whatever, that can locate interesting audio content on other people's machines, with copyright and licensing issues being a between you and the person providing the content and none of their business?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Well thats what I call my self anyway. Here is my program, just cut and paste into google search and get your free music. intitle:index.of "parent directory" *.mp3
peace
hell yea.
d.
BTW the group is Ten Hands. They split just after releasing with a major lable and formed jazz bands (I heard).
Some people seem unable to ever be happy. We give you bread, and you complain because it's not sliced.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And how else would you peruse a free service? EMW2K?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.gofish.com/
I didn't -- cough -- work on this or anything. Really.
fwiw, I did a search "centralpc sermons" and found the MP3's of our church's sermons... or 46 of them anyway (far from all). They're free.
So, not everything there is pay-stuff, though I can't prove that for music.
Searching for data that is in the metadata of the MP3s gives odd results. If "Any" is selected some searches don't find anything whereas they do when "artist" is selected (same keywords). Seems odd. I'd think "Any" would be a superset of the "artist" match results.
Seems weak IMHO as well. I typed in a few searchs and went pages and pages without anything but links to online music retailers.
Why would I waste time doing this went I can simply hop on a Usenet server or Itunes and get what I want instantly? If both of those services and the Internet at large don't have it I'm sure as fuck not going to go through the trouble of signing up for another online store that A) has its own form of DRM that won't work with my player and B) would clash with what music software I'm using now C) would require a monthly fee OR require me to quit after a month. Does going through that sound like fun? It goes like this. Usenet, Itunes, Internet at large, CD from amazon.
Someone responded that it useful because then you can compare the online services to each other. Well you know what? You could do that before by taking 5 minutes and seeing what each one offers. This service tells you jack except for the cost, file format, and platform. Guess how many Mac users don't use Itunes Music store? Oh and being that the music stores prices are all similar this makes the information all the more useless. To get any decent info on what the gotchas are for each service google is your friend.
Again, this is nothing but a marketing ploy to show that Yahoo's music store is cheaper than everyone else. Are people here unable to figure that out for some reason? If Yahoo didn't sell music I'd say "oh well, kinda useless but this MIGHT be helpful to some people". But that's not the case and because of that I just don't see much if any value here.
Wow, what a waste of my time writing all of that.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
One can search by file extension with google btw. Just use the filetype: operator. eg. Pizza Cookbook filetype:pdf
Why not fork?
You're lucky!
Imagine trying to find a song which is composed nearly entirely of metallic-garbage-can-tops drums!
I thought it would be an audio search where you upload a clip and it tells you where it's from. I've got some unlabled clips that I want to know more about.
THAT would be amazing, I think a service like that was/is offered for cell-phones to identify a song in the background...or something.
Tried an example. Irate sent me a song, for example, Liquid Bridge, by Brett Hunt.
Searching for that on yahoo audio search, zip.
Google, it was the third result. Without any filetype filters or anything.
Hmmm.
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