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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."
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.
http://www.altavista.com/audio/default has been around for quite some time. How is this an innovation?
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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
Actually, I remember seeing this somewhere. I want to say it was on the old tech TV (back before G4 ran it into the ground). You hum the tune of the song or audio clip and it matches it to similar sounding audio files.
(As I was writing this I remembered the name)
Query by hum, here is the website. querybyhum.cs.nyu.edu
Interesting and fun, although not particularly useful, there are more efficient ways to search data (Metadata), although this way may be more natural to the way humans work. Not to mention the fact that it requires a rather time intensive process of creating profiles of each audio file to be matched against.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Google lets you use the following query: "springsteen filetype:mp3" to search for mp3 files with springsteen in the file name. I don't use Yahoo on principle, so I haven't seen how it works and whether it's better than Google in any way.
This service is more akin to froogle than to straight google - it's abotu comparison shopping ove r the various different pay to download services. To their credit they bother to let you comparison shop not just on price, but on format and DRM/license restrictions. This isn't a replacement for finding your favourite illegal download, it is potentially a replacement for just running your search on iTMS for that song you want to buy.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
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"
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Search results:
750,234 results found.
Hey look, most top 40 songs from the last 10 years. This is pretty handy!
2 results found:
The Beatles - "I'm So Tired"
The Beatles - "She's Leaving Home"
There you go! Proof!
Well, it could be different in the quantity of information it catalogues and the quality of the search used. For example, the classical music geek above searched for "Ich habe genug" and got results. With altavista you also get useful results (i.e. the quantity of information seems similar). He/she also used some interior text from the cantata like "Mein Trost ist nur allein" and still got useful information. This wasn't the case when I used altavista (i.e. the quality of indexing may be inferior).
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
Yes, Google's "dig through the help files to find the command and then type a command line-like argument" is much easier then Yahoo's complicated "just type what you want in the search bar" approach. I can see why you don't use Yahoo on principle, those fuckers just can't make things simple.
Why don't you try checking out this site: http://next.yahoo.com/ . It's full of cool Yahoo innovations (like Google Labs). A lot of the apps on there don't get mentioned on Slashdot for some reason, but most are really cool.