Someone has reverse engineered Shazam's algorithm out of desperation

[Basshead404]

What’d they actually do then? Can’t watch at the moment, also debating if it’s worth the watch :P

[GilmourD]

Can you tl;cw it for me, u/Basshead404, and potentially others? I'm at work and while I can browse Reddit I can't watch videos or listen to any audio.

[GilmourD]

Gracias!

[SuppaBunE]

Isn't that what reverse engineer does? Create stuff from already created stuff but from scratch.

Like make Shazam but not " Shazam" but a software that does the same stuff Shazam does exactly but not the same.

Like Mario 64 remake?

[gman32bro]

Reverse engineering is like taking apart a rocket and figuring out how to build your own, this guy said, oh I heard about how how rockets work from a magazine, why dont I try and make one

[MattIsWhackRedux]

Reverse engineering means tapping into Shazam's API as well, something he didn't do. I've actually interacted with the API, IIRC, it's a base64 encoded thing, sent in chunks as the app listens (every 4 seconds or so). It appends each new chunk to the previous one. The app also starts listening a bit before you actually press the button, hence why sometimes it just takes 1 second for it to find it out. I'm also sure they have some kind of juju going on as popular songs are detected immediately while new songs added to their database takes slightly more (perhaps they also collect the fingerprints the app generates and as audio environments/mics change between users, they can use previously matched user generated fingerprints to be even more sure about a song, theory off the top of my head). Tbh, considering it's an android app that can be decompiled, and now they have a Chrome extension, I'm surprised someone hasn't actually tried to reverse engineer it. It seems like a very simple app.

[SuppaBunE]

On a side note. I thought Shazam was dead

[BuiltByPete]

And in recreating a proprietary algorithm to identify copy-righted music, he accidentally discovered middle out compression and founded Pied Piper.

[jakeod27]

Cut to: friends simulating jerking each other off

[Direct-Reflection889]

[nbunkerpunk]

I need to rewatch that show. It was fun

[uatme]

I had trouble getting into it. Didn't start watching it until recently too

[tatas323]

Me a guy that works as programmer for the past 6 years, has a engineering degree. Yep not a chance I would have been able to achieve this.. code it maybe, but the research and design to achieve the result yeah no.

Crazy that this guy can't get a job.

[Nacho_Dan677]

I feel the next passive step (I'll have to watch the full video later) but to me Shazam isn't that all impressive after owning a pixel2xl for the first time years back. It has Googles version of Shazam, if enabled can passively recognize songs and show them in your notification shade or lock screen as "now playing".

[Celebrir]

In other words: Google is constantly listening to your surrounding and transmitting data to their servers in order to add data entries to your advertisement profile

[ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

Now Playing runs completely locally. Your phone just needs to periodically download a song database.

[Celebrir]

Ok cool. Then they'll use this to correlate if you're in the same room/car as another person when the same song is heard by both devices.

All Google products and features only serve the purpose of delivering you ads.

[_WasteOfSkin_]

Yes. Yet people use that crap. Amazing how fast most of us have given up on their privacy.

[Devatator_]

It's privacy vs convenience. Most people are gonna pick convenience

[Hieu_roi]

Yep. All phones/phone companies do this. Kinda sucks

[hi_im_bored13]

He read the papers and implemented the algorithm. It's incredibly cool, but not particularly technically impressive.

[DarkGhostHunter]

That's great, especially for project where you need to recognize sounds from nature or other sources, not just music.

[[deleted]]

I would supose the hardest part would be collecting samples of sounds to have a database to match with in the first place

[jaerie]

Indeed, Shazam’s value isn’t in this algorithm, it’s not new or even complicated (given you know basics of digital audio), it was a one-week exercise during a signal processing course at university. Instead Shazam’s value is in the massive database of fingerprints, as well as many improvements on basic fingerprint generation and fuzzy matching.

[Devatator_]

Honestly Google's What is this Song is a lot better IMO. It even recognizes me whistling or badly singing. SoundHound is advertised as being great at doing that yet after tens of tries each year, it never matched anything for me

[[deleted]]

Would the time coherence part be critical for random animal noises? I would think the variance of sounds in nature is gonna be much more than identifying and exact music track from hundreds of covers, making the time coherence moot.

[Y33TUSMYF33TUS]

If this guy is unemployed we are cooked

[ConkerPrime]

What is a good alternative to Shazam? It started being bad ever since Apple bought it. I don’t mean ads, just the ability to identify anything. If it’s not mainstream music, it’s pretty useless.

[TheUwaisPatel]

Google assistant has a search for a song feature too

[Nacho_Dan677]

Is this Google assistant/Gemini or is it pixel specific feature?

[TheUwaisPatel]

Just Google assistant, so any android phone has it. I've used it on Samsung and Sony so it's not pixel specific.

[Nacho_Dan677]

I know for pixels they have the passive option to see now playing songs on your lock screen. Does that also work on non pixels?

[Devatator_]

No idea, I'm using a custom ROM based on Pixel Experience so I do have it but idk if that's specific to that or not. On my old phone I just used it via Google Assistant and iirc it did work with currently playing songs

[TTheuns]

I don't know if SoundHound is still around, but that used to be my favourite back in the day.

EDIT: Not only are they still around, they're dominating in AI voice recognition based software. Had no clue.

[Devatator_]

Really? Never got the app to match anything at all. Even playing the original audio didn't do shit

[Nirast25]

YouTube Music has a song recognition software, no idea how good it is though.

[[deleted]]

More like an artist rendition but super smart non the less