Shazam (service)
 |
It has been suggested that Shazam Entertainment be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) Proposed since July 2011. |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009) |
 |
|
| Founder(s) | Chrip Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Avery Wang |
|---|---|
| Website | www.shazam.com |
Shazam is a commercial mobile phone based music identification service, with its headquarters in London, England. The company was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Avery Wang.[1]
Shazam uses a mobile phone's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user. Relevant links to services such as iTunes, YouTube, Spotify or Zune are incorporated into some implementations of Shazam.
Contents |
[edit] Implementations
Shazam's oldest service, started in 2002, is the 2580 service, accessible only in the United Kingdom. Customers dial the shortcode 2580 from their mobile phone and hold the phone to capture any music playing in the background. The service analyzes the captured sound and seeks a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of more than 11 million songs[2] The result is sent to the customer in the form of an SMS. Customers are charged for the call to the shortcode and are charged for any successfully matched (tagged) tracks.
Shazam is also a free or low-cost application for some Android devices, Apple iPhone, BlackBerry devices, Nokia smartphones, Windows Phone devices, and most Sony Ericsson phones (not to be confused with Sony Ericsson's own TrackID, which is a similar application).[3] The application is similar on most phones and, unlike before, it does not text the response, instead the result is shown on the screen complete with details on Artist, Album, Title, Genre, Music label, lyrics, a thumbnail image of the song/album artwork, links to download the song on iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store and, where relevant, show the song's video on YouTube.
A similar application is available for Java compatible handsets called ShazamiD. ShazamiD differs from the smartphone applications in that ShazamiD is a subscription service and only available in the UK (customers currently pay £2.00 per month and must text a shortcode to receive a link to the midlet), whereas Shazam for other platforms is a free application.
[edit] How it works
Shazam identifies songs based on an audio fingerprint based on a time-frequency graph called the spectrogram.
Shazam stores a catalog of audio fingerprints in a database. The user tags a song for 10 seconds and the application creates an audio fingerprint based on some of the anchors of the simplified spectrogram and the target area between them. For each point of the target area, they create a hash value that is the combination of the frequency at which the anchor point is located, the frequency at which the point in the target zone is located, and the time difference between the point in the target zone and when the anchor point is located in the song. Once the fingerprint of the audio is created, Shazam starts the search for matches in the database if there is a match, the information is returned to the user, otherwise it returns an error.[4]
[edit] Service
Shazam offers three types of applications; a free-to-try program simply called Shazam, their pay-to-play program called Shazam Encore, and their most recent addition called (Shazam)RED. Shazam Encore and (Shazam)RED do not differ in features or price (both are priced at 5.99 USD) but a portion of the application payment for (Shazam)RED purchases is donated to support AIDS/HIV relief in Africa, part of the Product Red campaign. There are some small differences between Shazam and the paid version, Shazam Encore, most notably the music tagging limit. With Shazam, the user is given five free tags per day. This means that if a user tags five songs in one day, they can't tag any more until the start of the next day. However, on Shazam Encore, there is no tag limit, so the user is allowed to record as much as they like. Shazam is currently available in 200 countries and 30 languages.[5]
[edit] Limitations
Shazam can identify music anywhere: from the radio, television, cinema or in a store, the limitation is that it can only work with prerecorded music.
[edit] Similar apps
- SoundHound is an application quite similar to Shazam whose main advantages that can be viewed in order to view the lyrics of the songs being played and it is cheaper.[6]
- Midomi can take a person's voice, hum, or whistle and discover songs from that alone, but relies on user-submitted song clips as well.
- Gracenote's MusicID-Stream has the main advantage of having the largest database of all music IDs (with more than 28 million songs).
- Musipedia is a music search engine that works differently from others because instead of using techniques to identify recorded music, it can identify pieces of music from a single melody or rhythm.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.director.co.uk/magazine/2009/11%20December/shazam_63_04.html
- ^ http://www.shazam.com/music/web/about.html
- ^ http://www.symphonicdistribution.com/2011/symnews/shazam-integrated-with-symphonic-distribution/
- ^ http://soyoucode.com/2011/how-does-shazam-recognize-song
- ^ "Behind the app: Shazam Encore". PhoneDog. 2010-07-19. http://www.phonedog.com/2010/07/19/bta-shazam-encore/. Retrieved 2011-04-04.
- ^ http://lifehacker.com/5757214/shazam-vs-soundhound-battle-of-the-mobile-song-id-services
