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Real-Time Radio Search Engine From Music Industry's Nemesis

Posted by timothy on from the gadflies-love-being-swatted dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From the guy who brought you CD syncing and the original music locker (both of which saw lawsuits from record labels) comes the latest invention to rock the music world: a real-time radio search engine. 1000s of worldwide stations are indexed in real-time and users can search and play most any popular artist — even the digital holdouts (Tool, Led Zeppelin, etc) that are unavailable on paid services like Spotify. (Kinda wonder why Google hasn't done this.) Link on main page points to an API for those who want to build mobile and web services."

16 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Innocent? by kubajz · · Score: 3, Informative

    This seems quite innocent and hugely useful at the same time - can anyone see the angle from which the rights holders will most likely try to attack his effort? :)

    1. Re:Innocent? by paiute · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This seems quite innocent and hugely useful at the same time - can anyone see the angle from which the rights holders will most likely try to attack his effort? :)

      Yes. "More people are listening to our product, therefore...uh...GIVE US MONEY!"

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    2. Re: Innocent? by malchus842 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sure. Pass new laws that make it illegal....or include it in the new Trans-Pacific treaty, along with every other wish they have on their list.....

    3. Re:Innocent? by stjobe · · Score: 4, Funny

      Listening to music without paying is not "innocent", it's downright unamerican. Or at least a threat to our beloved capitalism. If nobody makes a buck from it, it's gotta go.

      You're not one of them pinko commie socialist types that think you can get something for nothing are you? Remember, you don't always get what you pay for, but you always have to pay.

      Always.

      Disclaimer: Portions of the above post may contain traces of sarcasm, cynism, or just downright trolling. Handle with care.

      --
      "Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
    4. Re:Innocent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It probably depends on individual countries.

      It doesn't look like they are actually capturing any data for rebroadcast:

      About half are internet only stations and half are simulcasters who are transmitting their AM/FM station online as well.

      ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uxzNqPIZE0R_DJiMSR-NA5-yoc6APgt56odOixFlNZ0 )

      That may not make them safe however as they appear to be embedding the streams rather than linking to an appropriate page on the streams source. Depending on the country you're in this is a bit of a grey area - you could be found to be infringing or liable for damages if you cause service/load problems for the original host or losses in revenue.

      Whether they could be extradited from the US to another country for such a crime is also up for debate but it certainly seems possible depending on the terms of the extradition treaties.

      Disclaimer: IANAL: But IP law, especially as it's applied across countries - is messed up.

  2. Curious about the technology they use by vikingpower · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How do they do it ? Do they use a near-real-time indexing technology like elasticsearch or Apache Lucene ? Did they build something by themselves ?

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    1. Re:Curious about the technology they use by Dmritard96 · · Score: 2

      Echonest (startup in boston) has some libs on github for audio fingerprinting and retrievel. That solves part of it, but the labeling seems like it might be the tricky part. As far as how to quickly search, yeah maybe elasticsearch, but it might not really be needed as the number of songs is pretty finite.

    2. Re:Curious about the technology they use by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

      the number of songs is pretty finite.

      True. Not only do ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC control a limited number of musical compositions, about 10 or 20 million at my last count, but the whole set of possible musical compositions is limited to a couple hundred million at most. If you want, I can explain further. (Hint: lawsuits alleging 8 note similarity, 14 possibilities for each note after the first, 14^(8 - 1))

      But the number of recordings of these songs is effectively unbounded, as is the number of ways stations can distort any particular recording. Different stations use slightly different level compressors on the signal, with slightly different methods of compensating for what the combination of level compression and FM preemphasis does to the "s" sound. And a lot of stations appear to use a 6% speedup, which pitches the music up by a semitone and allows fitting a few extra commercials in each hour. The matching metric had better be pretty robust.

  3. moskva.fm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know there is a Russian service that does this really well (http://moskva.fm, you need to understand the language). It's like a 24/7 DVR (well, DAR) combined with Shazam and extensive hyperlinking (so you can do things like "which stations played this song"). Pretty neat, but sadly I agree that RIAA lawyers have already been summoned to draft lawsuits.

  4. How is this new, exactly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've already got an app that I use for searching and listening (and even recording) called TuneIn... It's on iOS, Android, and has a web interface as well.

    http://tunein.com/

    Not sure what this really brings to the table.

  5. MR Responds by mp3michael715 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Always nice to get a mention on Slashdot... except for the idiot in Brazil who is spidering the site and will be blocked in 3, 2, 1.... Some of my inventions have been blazed new trails like DVR for radio (DAR.fm), CD syncing (BeamIt), and the music locker (MP3tunes) but I don't think this service is in the same category because it's really an intelligence layer on top of radio. What news.google.com did for newspapers, we're trying to do for radio: make it searchable, bubble up top content and ultimately give users much more control. That's always a good thing in my book. The commenter who said we don't rebroadcast is accurate. The stream goes from the broadcaster directly to the end user's computer. It's worth nothing that the broadcaster may have royalty obligations similar to how Pandora has to pay royalties or any other online streamer. The record labels and the publishers are being paid. If you have suggestions for the service, please email me. mr@michaelrobertson.com Thanks!

  6. Re: Internet radio quality sucks. by supersat · · Score: 4, Informative

    High bitrate (128+ kbps) streams are almost always strictly better than FM. FM audio is band-limited to about 15 KHz so they have bandwidth for stereo (the 19 KHz pilot and 30 KHz of bandwidth around 38 KHz for the stereo signal).

    One other dirty little secret of the radio industry is that many studio-transmitter links are just 128 kbps ISDN links -- most of which are MP3, although newer equipment supports AAC as well. Additionally, while the exact codec of HD Radio is a trade secret, it's thought to be very similar to HE-AAC running at 96kbps. Even 64kbps HE-AAC sounds pretty good.

  7. /robots.txt by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    except for the idiot in Brazil who is spidering the site and will be blocked in 3, 2, 1

    You appear to have no valid /robots.txt file on the site. This won't stop intentionally misbehaving spiders, but right now, you don't even appear to indicate at all (in a machine-readable manner) that spiders aren't welcome. But before drafting /robots.txt, you need to make a decision: Do you want your result pages to be in Bing and Google, or do you want to hide your site from users of general web search?

  8. get your facts right... by Aryden · · Score: 2

    Tool and Led Zeppelin are absolutely available on Spotify and Pandora.

    1. Re:get your facts right... by Aryden · · Score: 2

      You're correct, both on Pandora but not on Spotify, yet another reason to use pandora instead.

  9. Snippets by Exitlights · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Finally, a site where I can hear the last 30 seconds of any song I want!