Creating Shazam in Java (opens in new tab)

Update: I posted a link to some source code that implements the Shazam algorithm:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5724442

About the patent lawsuit thing:

As I understand it, Shazam sold their patent to Landmark Digital Services, which are a part of BMI the record label. They kept an exclusive license to make Shazam-like software for phones.

You can imagine BMI wanting it to make money from how a service such as Youtube fingerprints and detects copyright infringement...

And it was this BMI company that were trying to get this blog post explaining the patented algorithm removed from the internet.

One post from the BMI lawyers to Roy in the Netherlands was particularly broad bullying:

> Mr. Van Rijn,

> The two example patent numbers that I sent you are U.S. patents, but each of these patents has also been filed as patent applications in the Netherlands. Also, as I'm sure you are aware, your blogpost may be viewed internationally. As a result, you may contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the world.

> While we trust your good intentions, yes, we would like you to refrain from releasing the code at all and to remove the blogpost explaining the algorithm.

> Thank you for your understanding.

> Best regards,

> Darren

> P. Briggs

> Vice President &

> Chief Technical Officer

> Landmark Digital Services, LLC

Roy gave a great talk at Devox about this: http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2012/03/devoxx-2011-talk-freely-a...

I think I heard that Shazam recently got the patent back. I speculate BMI found no-one to license their fingerprinting tech for copyright infringement.

This is very cool. Minimum clear implementation of the algorithm that replicates the effect of Shazam. It's refreshing to see a blog with actual code sample got voted up instead of all the press releases.

I mirrored this implementation a while ago since the full source isn't available. It was not nearly as successful as the blogger portrays. For example, if I used a high quality wav mono file to create a fingerprint it would have a hard time identifying a track that is an mp3. It seems the maximums actually get shifted and merged from compression. In other words there's a reason shazam uses entropy based anchor points to help it pick hashing values.

For those interested in more about the algorithm, one of the guys who created Shazam released a whitepaper on it. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

After using Shazam, I was kind of hoping there was more to it than just a time windowed frequency domain peak-pick algorithm. The algorithm itself is pretty basic from a signal processing perspective, but I think the key insight here was that the results are unique enough to store off and compare other samples against at some later point in time.

Can someone please compare it to other fingerprinting approaches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint ?

So, the patent infringement story ended up with "Good luck."?

This is interesting

I wonder how the work is split between client/server in (actual) Shazam. (I suppose only the key points are sent to the server, but I may be wrong - Siri for example sends the server a compressed audio file of the recorded sound)

Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

First time I used Shazam, was so amazed. Had to download the original paper, still couldn't understand well enough how it worked, in order to code it. now lets get to work on it.

Great article, thank you

Good article, title should have [2010] in it.

One possible way to solve the legal troubles is to just remove any references to the product name 'Shazam'. You could title the blog post "Algorithm in Java that identifies music similar to other commercial products" (too long.. but use your imagination)

From where Shazam gets its content - fingerprint database?

I mean, did they bought/rent mp3's?

We had a 'build your own Shazam' as a lab for Berkeley's Intro. Signals & Systems class this semester. Super cool to see it working and quite an interesting application of Signals & Systems

What ever happened to the "patent infringement" issue?

Is there any code changes that you can make to not conflict with the patent?

For the first time I'm surprised that one of the first comments isn't "why was it written in Java, bla, bla bla". Those were getting really annoying.

I wonder if they would have bothered you if you had named the post: "Creating Google Ears in Java"

Who made that article could have said what external libraries did (s)he use.