Shazam

[JamesCherrill]

OK, I just tried Shazam and it blew me away. Does anyone have any idea at all as to how it works? It seems to be able to match a 20 second highly-distorted sound clip anywhere in any of millions of tracks in a couple of seconds. Obviously it's not matching the audio waveform, so presumably it extracts some kind of "signature" from the sample, but what?

Any info gratefully received!

thanks

[Menge]

it's just statistical matching of the waveform, man.

if you extract a signature, it'll obviously be different. the waveform, however distorted, can be matched with a certain confidence to a clean sample they have :)

[JamesCherrill]

Thanks for the reply Menge. I can see that a statistical match would work for a known sample, but my clip needs to be matched somewhere in a database of millions of tracks (and the clip may start anywhere any track); I don't see how they could try to check every possible starting point in every track by matching waveforms, no matter how efficient it was!