Analyzing YouTube's Audio Fingerprinter

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.'"

Comments

Slashdot brainstorm here

[eclectro]

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?

I'd rather lose the last 30 seconds

[Knave75]

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.