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by Shebanator 3182 days ago
I work for google but have no clue what underlying tech is being used here. But I have some familiarity with audio fingerprinting, so I thought I'd comment.

Using a not particularly efficient but reliable fingerprinting algorithm such as http://www.ismir2002.ismir.net/proceedings/02-FP04-2.pdf, you need 2.6kbits/sec for the fingerprint. Popular songs tend to be short, so lets say 3:30 per song on average. That works out to about 70K per song, or 70MB per 1000 songs. But compression and/or other sorts of encoding cleverness could massively reduce this number. Bottom line is that it wouldn't be hard to store thousands of fingerprints given a few hundred megabytes of storage (out of 64GB or more).
2 comments
pedalpete 3182 days ago
You don't need then entire song for a fingerprint, and the MusicBrainz (MetaBrainz) project has long been supported by Google.

I couldn't find anything which said how big their db is, but you could do some artist/song popularity smarts to figure out the tracks a user is most likely to listen to.

But to constantly be searching through fingerprints for every sound? I'd be interested to see what Googles solution to this may be.

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imaginenore 3182 days ago
There were 75K albums (not just songs) released in 2010 alone. The total number of songs is in hundreds of millions.

No way you can fit their fingerprints and the metadata into 64GB, compressed or not.

Shazam has 40M fingerprints in their DB, and they definitely don't have everything. Their software runs on beefy servers.

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pgeorgi 3182 days ago
The claim in the presentation was "the 10k most popular songs", updated weekly.

That won't satisfy the jazz nerd's needs, but they probably know their entire catalog by heart anyway.

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archagon 3182 days ago
I mean, would that satisfy a majority of needs, even? When I use Shazam, it's usually to identify a weird instrumental or otherwise obscure song that I've never heard before.
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kllrnohj 3181 days ago
If you do the explicit ask for what song is playing then it starts recording and sends it to the cloud just like Shazam. Presumably that recognizes far more than just 10k most popular songs.

This is just passive recognition which can have much less coverage since you aren't relying on it.

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patd 3182 days ago
It depends on what the goal is. Is it to identify the song à la Shazam or to display lyrics, concert tickets info, ... ?
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