I suppose that many stations don't have such markers though.
First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky.
The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database.
On the other hand, the described project only scratches my own itch. I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations.
No fancy ML needed, after a couple of times the filter gets one of these repeating fragments it should be able to block it. Fairness bonus: you get to hear each new ad a couple of times.
Maybe radio spots are a little different because they're cheaper and usually more low-quality than TV ads, but it doesn't really work for TV ads - they often have small variations, e.g. 10sec identical, 5sec different, 10sec identical (easy example). Also depending on your method of analyzing the audio it's sometimes broadcast with an unhearable fingerprint that distorts the waveform (let's say like MP3 versus WAV, but worse).
So yes, you can find some patterns - but the commercial breaks are highly mixed up and you wouldn't believe how many distinct commercials per channel are there, even if you think you hear the same ones all the time :)
There were previously some FM to MP3 "ripping" tools that would use the RDS information to tag the resulting recordings -- I'm not sure of the status of them. But it could provide a good way to detect commercials, since most radio stations change to a generic station identification message when they break for commercials / banter. (Whether you'd also want to turn down for banter is another question.)
Yes, or perhaps a combination of techniques. E.g. shared database to train an ML system to detect ads. Of course, the downside is that the ad industry will then tweak the ads until they pass the ML test.
> I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations.
I wouldn't think of it as taking away a source of income, but rather as forcing them to find a source that doesn't bother their customers so much. Ad blockers seem to be getting more accepted.
Nothing like a little competition to motivate the improvement of ML systems :)
My home theater receiver does this (Marantz). It works pretty well. It doesn't cancel out the TV commercials though, it just normalizes the volume so it matches the show. But, I assume you could make it work for muting too.
Do you have similar objections to things like self-driving vehicle technology that will take away the main source of income for truck drivers?
I've often toyed with the same idea of the parent poster
