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Analyzing YouTube's Audio Fingerprinter

Posted by timothy on from the streeeeeehtch-thiiiiingsss-ouuuuuut dept.

Al Benedetto writes "I stumbled across this article which analyzes the YouTube audio content identification system in-depth. Apparently, since YouTube's system has no transparency, the behaviors had to be determined based on dozens of trial-and-error video uploads. The author tries things like speed/pitch adjustment, the addition of background noise, as well as other audio tweaks to determine exactly what you'd need to adjust before the fingerprinter started mis-identifying material. From the article: 'When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research.'"

11 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. This makes it pointless right? by Rayeth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I thought the purpose (however misguided it may be) was to prevent people from uploading copyrighted songs/music videos and re-mixing them. So if I only use portions of the song that aren't in the first 30s I'm home free? That seems silly, the system must still be under refinement or is only there to stop the most blatant offenders.

  2. Slashdot brainstorm here by eclectro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here's an idea. Start out the video with a useless narrative for the first thirty seconds "blah blah blah skip until :30 and ignore this intro blah blah" then start the music. That way everybody is happy. All google employees are too elitist to read slashdot, right?

    --
    Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
    1. Re:Slashdot brainstorm here by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...and then you realize, that YouTube changed the algorithm, and that its compression makes your song sound so shitty anyway, that you actually want all the uploads to be taken down. ^^

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    2. Re:Slashdot brainstorm here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I see where you're going with this: put an advertisement at the start :-)

    3. Re:Slashdot brainstorm here by VeryLargeNumber · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Even better - upload the video backwards.
      Someone should make backward youtube plugin for firefox. It even might autodetect backward songs and play them properly.

  3. Tragic by dedazo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That cool tech like this is being used to prevent "piracy" instead of something more useful.

    --
    Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
    1. Re:Tragic by Runaway1956 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At one end of the scale, you'll find those who think the world owes them entertainment. At the other end of the scale, you'll find those copyright squatters who think the world owes them a lavish living for sitting on dead men's works, and for acquiring a monopoly on distribution schemes.

      On your same scale, throwing a kid in jail for wanting to hear music without paying the parasites is just about negative infinity.

      Now that we have judged each other's positions, got anything constructive to offer?

      How about selling the kids all the music they want at a penny or a nickel a song, and allow them fair use, and personal copying right? Ditch the DRM. The use of DRM costs the copyright holder more than distribution!! It's not like it COSTS to distribute - especially if the copyright holders get their heads out of their butts, and use popular distribution schemes, like The Pirate Bay.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  4. Research? by mi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    but it's something that merits further research.

    Why exactly does it merit any research? This is not riddle posed by Nature — people devised this device (ha-ha), and know all the answers perfectly already, they just don't want to tell you. You are not advancing scientific progress by figuring out somebody's scheme.

    You may be advancing your own knowledge and skills, but calling it "research" has no more merit, than paparazzis' "research" into celebrities' lives...

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:Research? by radtea · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is not riddle posed by Nature

      This is one of the wonderful things about science: it doesn't matter where the puzzle comes from, the same techniques work to solve it.

      Reverse engineering of this kind is one of the most useful areas of applied science, and it is as much research as any other area of scientific enquiry. It is frequently the case that there are many ways to find the answer to a puzzle, and this guy has chosen one of them based on the resources he has available. More power to him for demonstrating how good science can be used to discover what others want to keep secret.

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
  5. Re:Doesn't really matter for most people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My beef with the system is that when culurally significant videos such as the Chinese "Caonima" get taken down because the song violates some copyright of a company I've never heard of on a song I've never in a million years think of buying.

    So copyrights only apply to companies you've personally heard of and it's a song you'd buy? That's pretty stupid.

  6. I'd rather lose the last 30 seconds by Knave75 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    An unfortunate result. The last 30 seconds of most songs are not usually as interesting as the first 30 seconds.

    I wonder if he tried mangling the first 30 seconds at all. For example, keep the first 5 seconds, mess up the 6th and 7th seconds, and then continue on. Or perhaps adding in a base line that would be hard to hear. Or something at the high end of the audio frequency spectrum, to annoy all those teenagers while I listen to my free music in peace.