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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

Shazam is the one app that has been around since about the birth of the iPhone that honestly still blows my mind in it's capabilities. The fact it can so quickly figure out any song in so many environments is incredible. Call me simple, but I use it almost daily, and it is accurate close to 98% of the time. I absolutely love Shazam's iOS app, and they have done a great job keeping up with UI/UX treads for it over the many years it has been around. Easily one of my favorite and most used apps.

With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration.

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> With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple

I don't think the overall UX, song recognition, tag tracking will be ruined

> Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration.

Well that was pretty much what Apple paid for. I can already see that all my shazam tags automatically show up in Apple Music for me. Clearly this is just becoming another growth channel for Apple music which means their Spotify integration will likely be diminished or end.

> I can already see that all my shazam tags automatically show up in Apple Music for me

That was happening before the acquisition as well

Yeah, Shazam was the last Zero to One moment I had with Tech. A true, visceral in-the-moment 'wow' that no social media giant or app has come close to emulating.

The user value to time investment ratio is off the charts for Shazam. I love music and what they have done for it, especially in the context of other music apps like Spotify et al.

Second the Don't Ruin It Apple plea, but congrats to the creators on a well-deserved exit.

Google Now natively supports song detection in surroundings. It is also pretty good at it, and Google will do it passively without ever needing to open it as an app.

I used Shazam a long time ago, so dunno how it had changed, but it certainly isn't a novel idea.

Google Now won't detect music for you outside the US (Shazam does)

soundhound will though :) I have not used it in a while, but I used to have both apps on my phone

It works in Poland (tested few seconds ago).

works in Canada

Google now works in France

  and Google will do it passively without ever needing to open it as an app.

Listening 24/7 isn't a privacy invasion at all.

It uses an offline database of songs to make this feature work, without uploading your surrounding sounds.

Seriously? Shouldn't that be gb's of data? If anything would be cloud dependent, I thought this would be it.

The amount of songs with fingerprints stored on-device is several orders of magnitudes lower than the full library (tens of thousands instead of millions): https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now-p...

it only supports the most popular few thousand songs

Turns, out most of us are boring and predicable and storing prints for 10 000 songs is enough to recognize most of the songs people are listening to.

> still blows my mind in it's capabilities.

Just to jog people's memory, patent threats were sent to others doing similar things [0]. Not sure if that represents Shazam or not, but if so, they'll fit in perfectly with Apple.

0 - http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/

I thought Apple only went after big companies that copied their design?

I've never heard of Apple threatening individuals in the Open Source community -- am I missing something?

> am I missing something?

Not particularly. With conditionals added, we can differentiate any behavior and pretend similarities don't exist.

Do you have examples? I am not personally aware of any...

I agree with the lauding of Shazam, but I am interested in your statement "I use it almost daily" -- what for? I've always viewed Shazam as a novelty and have installed and uninstalled it a few random times, but as Jobs would say it seems like a feature not a product.

I can't speak for who you're replying to, but I find myself using it at restaurants, bars, and public locations where music is playing, as well as friends' cars, and other social gatherings. I know these sort of situations are rare for the average HN user.

> I know these sort of situations are rare for the average HN user.

A generalization if I ever saw one.

Have you ever heard about the concept of the "joke?" Novelty thing, I tell you. Admittedly, it might be a bit too recent of a concept for the average person to be aware of, especially with how radical it is.

Here's a recent book of them, to help you get "in" on the "hip slang" of tomorrow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philogelos

Foghorn Leghorn has some comments for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTwnwbG9YLE

And the original Senator Claghorn that Foghorn Leghorn was channeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBE92naflJ0

They're also rare for anyone over 30 to care about (if not the situations themselves, what some random soundtrack to them is). Give it time...

Other people might be different from you.

A correct statement based on three wrong assumptions.

1) That I've lost interest in music myself (I didn't).

2) That whether some other people might not lose music was disputed. Perhaps you imagined me as some strange creature in a cave that has never heard or known of people that maintain their interest in music to their late age.

3) That the fact that some other people don't lose interest in music is relevant. I was making a general statement ("it's also rare"). Most people do lose interest in music compared to their younger years. That's not some fringe claim, it's borne out by buying patterns and studies. People tend to stick to the music of their youth time and again. Even the new artists they discover tend to be of the same genres and styles in vogue when they were younger.

Even if so, why would that mean older people have no use for Shazam? Have you never heard an old song you half-recognized and thought “huh, what band is that again?”

>why would that mean older people have no use for Shazam?

It doesn't mean "older people have no use for Shazam".

It means "as it has been observed statistically, _most_ older people don't seem to have a use for Shazam and any random older person is more likely to fall into that category than the rest of the older people".

Carl Craig is old too.

>Have you never heard an old song you half-recognized and thought “huh, what band is that again?”

Yes, but this is not such a large part of the older demographic's lifestyle for the app to matter much to them.

Old people also want to send their dickpicks too, but they don't flock to Snapchat.

I would dispute 3, listening to the same genre doesn't imply you lost interest in music, because being interested doesn't comprise only of listening to the different genres. According to your definition if you listen to the same genres 7/24 your whole life, it means you lost interest in music after 30?

Listening to the same genre means that you're not as willing to search anymore. So even if you're still interested in _your_ kinds of music, you're not interest in exploring the musical landscape as much as you did -- your preferences have solidified.

But, honestly, I don't know how all this is controversial, unless someone is 20 and all their friends are too.

I'd expect anybody over 30 or so to verify that even if music is still a big deal for them, it's not as much for most of their friends as it was in their teen years and early 20s.

Unless you're 30 and all your friends are eg. DJs and techno-heads or heavy-metal fans still rocking those leather pants, the usual course is that they are more interesting in their careers, families, new babies, and binge watching TV and surfing, than following music, even if that was a big part of their identity in their teens. Is that inaccurate?

Yup. I too completely lost interest in music when I hit 30

Yup, because it matters what some outliers do when it comes to statements about the general population ("it's also rare")

I think I misunderstood ... what exactly is rare?

People being as interested to follow new music after 30-40 as opposed in their teens early 20s...

Seems possible, do you have studies or statistical data showing this?

By 30, I had already committed every song to memory so I no longer needed Shazam.

I don't go out much, but when I do, most music I've experienced seems to be tolerable at best and ear-assault at worst. I can only think of maybe 2 or 3 times in the past decade where I've heard music in a public location and was interested enough to want to know what song it was.

> I don't go out much

Behold, the average HN user I was referring to

It was an unrelated point, though. I'm not sure going out more would result in me finding more music I enjoy, unless I heavily vary where I go.

This "feature not a product" belief only makes sense if you pretend that the product doesn't provide the answer sought by its primary user and as byproduct produces a truly real-time stream/map of what music-enjoying people are interested in finding out more about.

This data would be incredibly valuable to companies trying to market and sell music. Like labels, and now, Apple. Not to mention keeping that data now out of the hands of others.

I mean a feature in a sense that it seems (although I assume I wrong and thus am asking) like something that one uses extremely rarely and offers limited utility. I have used Shazam a few times, and each time quickly install, use it, and remove it. I would have used it more if I could just ask Siri or Ok Google what a song was.

There is another reply to me that snarkily opines that the average HNer doesn't engage in social events, which is a bit humorous really because a more correct statement is that most people are socializing at social events, not doing inference on background music. I can say that I have never, ever seen another person pull out shazam in public.

You can ask Siri what the song is. One UI flaw is that music app is open or playing on your phone, she will name the active track. Otherwise, she will say ‘Listening...’ and then identify the song and artist, I think with iTunes links (or course!).

>This "feature not a product" belief only makes sense if you pretend that the product doesn't provide the answer sought by its primary user

It also makes sense if the scope of the product is not enough for it to make anyone pay for it (except as part of a larger product).

People don't pay for social networks either.

And you give away privacy as a result.

Social networks have a big enough scope to make money otherwise (you're literally using them for hours on end every day).

That's not the case for an app you might take out a couple of times a day (at best) to check some tune for 10 seconds.

> I am interested in your statement "I use it almost daily" -- what for?

I'm not the original commenter, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest—they use it to find out what a song is that they hear & like?

As a DJ constantly looking for tracks to add to the collection. I listen to streaming music pretty constantly. For individual tracks with all of the metadata, the artist/track name info is provided. For listening to other DJ mixes, you just get the DJ name and mix name. Shazam tells me the specific track.

I also use My Shazams as a potential mix list. If I have an item in My Shazams, it caught my attention for some reason. Just putting those tracks together into a set has worked out pretty well. It gets tricky if I'm using my phone as the streaming source. At that point, I usually just take a screen grab. If it's an individual track, I have artist/track name, and if it's a mix, I can use the playhead position to narrow down which track it was later.

>As a DJ constantly looking for tracks to add to the collection. I listen to streaming music pretty constantly. For individual tracks with all of the metadata, the artist/track name info is provided. For listening to other DJ mixes, you just get the DJ name and mix name. Shazam tells me the specific track.

So a pretty narrow demographic for the feature though...

Diabetes apps have a narrow demographic too. What's your point?

Diabetes apps operate on one of the most lucrative markets (health), and are essential and even life-saving for their demographic. Not a mere nicety for some creative professions...

Also, diabetes narrow? 30 million have it in the US, I'd say those are way more than DJs that need to recognize tunes, and have much more motive to use an app that helps them keep track of something that can have huge impact on their health...

I'm not a DJ, but i listen to electronic music mainly and it usually is on soundcloud in the form of sets. If 1001tracklist doesn't come through, Shazam is my go to app.

>So a pretty narrow demographic for the feature though...

If you're only going to take one person's usage then, yeah, I guess it's pretty narrow. How about another example for from the same person. As a video editor I'm constantly having to find "hip/trendy/cool" music for video edits. These clients typically like music that I do not normally listen to, but I know it's something they would like when I hear it. I'll let it live in My Shazams until one day I need to find something. I've impressed more than one client with the ability to pull out a "fresh" song for them. Clients appreciate that sort of thing.

>How about another example for from the same person.

How about it? We've just added video editor looking for cool music to DJ. We could add tens such cases more, but all those combined are still narrow demographics.

+1 on that usage.

If only Soundcloud/Mixcloud integrated it so you saw the current track while the mix played - likely avoided for copyright deniability?

Mixcloud actually had that. Then they've switched over to only displaying the current track. Then they've made some shitty version of music recognition similar to Shazam, which simply does not work for this use case (every single time it detects something, which happens almost never, it disregards that it's an edit/bootleg/remix of a song and displays the original instead).

In fact, as an uploader, you can still see it (I don't know why), but not as a listener. As an example, here's a screenshot of me viewing my own upload: https://imgur.com/a/REpxOgx

Editing tools still allow you to post accurate timestamps: https://i.imgur.com/gZabJUx.png

There's also a browser extension that modifies Mixcloud pages to display the tracklists again, but they're useless since no uploader has an incentive to go through the painful process of entering timestamps, and that process is now crowdsourced anyway thanks to 1001tracklists.

I don't use Shazam since I have a Pixel 2 that does the same thing in the background, but I use track recognition every day to automatically populate a Spotify playlist with all the music it recognizes throughout the day. It's really nice to have a playlist to scroll back through when I find myself asking "what was that cool song I heard yesterday?”

I probably use it once every couple weeks. So not quite daily, but certainly regularly. If you're a musically inclined person, Shazam is a superpower.

Soundhound is comparable in terms of detection quality and probably will keep their Spotify integration running in case Shazam locks people into Apple's ecosystem.

While I find Shazam to be amazing, I find SoundHound's capabilities even better in terms of identifying a song based on humming the tune or hearing a live version.

I was at a live jazz concert last night, and the trio started playing a riff on tune I recognized but couldn't exactly place. SoundHound nailed it (Sonny Rollins "Four"), while Shazam had no idea.

That's because that's not how Shazam's recognition works (unless they have a secondary mechanism). Shazam is very sensitive to time and frequency features of specific recordings, which is also what makes it so robust in noisy environments. Having both apps is handy for their relative strengths.

I'm with you. Shazam -> Spotify is incredibly useful.

Birth of the iPhone?! I remember using Shazam on my dumbphone driving home from university. That must have been 2002/3. Blew my mind. Pretty incredible really. Good for them!

I just hope they don't shit on the android support like Snapchat. It's the first ever paid app i got and i'd like to think that's saying something for an android user. Probably far fetch but it would be nice the android version became open source if that should ever get dropped by apple (so community can maintain it)

I can't really be bothered to install an app for this purpose but I'm constantly disappointed that Google's assistant is so bad at picking up music. I would say it works less than half the time. It only works in public areas if it's pretty quiet.

My experience with shazam is that it finds about a quarter of the tracks I'm looking for. It's really really incredibly good at finding anything that airs on the radio or exists in spotify. But outside of that the results drop off quickly.

Yes, that's my experience as well. I listen to and discover a lot of obscure, often rare music and Shazam isn't very helpful in these niches. Although that might be expected.

On a sidenote: It's surprising that Google isn't more useful in those searches either. Often I have to search for rare releases by relying on lyrics and Google's results are plain terrible. I understand that the lyrics are probably nowhere listed and idnexed, but considering that even the rarest releases are uploaded by someone on Youtube, some kind of auto transcription feature would be very helpful.

Sure, it's a niche interest, but the Discogs user base is still huge.

I spend a lot of time on Discogs.

>With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple.

This looks to me like an acquihire for the ML/AI/DL talent. So basically, yes they will be diverted to other projects.

Is Shazam really ML/AI/DL? I thought it was more of a signal processing and search engine system. You transform snippets of audio signals into text, pump it into a distributed database, and then perform a search against that. Maybe there is some AI involved in noise reduction, but that seems like a rather small component.

They do something that gets results. It doesn't matter if it's ML, AI, DL, linear regression, or just fingerprint+cosine similarity. There's some talent for getting some complex shit done.

They do audio fingerprinting[1], so no ML/AI in the core feature.

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[1]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

"Music information retrieval" is what researchers call the overarching field. You might say the Shazam algorithm is akin to those fields in the sense that it relies on feature extraction. It's possible they may train a classifier to do the matching, but yeah, probably not purely ML/AI/DL.

What ML/AI? This is fourier transforms and some nice UX.

Second this. And not just for english music. I have lost track how many times I have pulled up shazam to identify a bollywood song or an Indian regional song which I recognize vaguely from my childhood. It has always recognized it.

does Shazam also sync up lyrics? I havent used Shazam in years since I discovered Soundhound. Soundhound has a better ux imo and it also brings up the lyrics for popular songs and they are synced to the music as in they scroll by at the right place like karaoke

Tl;dr You're kinda boned. Apple Music integration will get better, but Spotify should be looking for an exit - before they get kicked out the door.

Not saying I agree with this, but given how most acquisitions go, other services don't survive long. Apple Music has an Android app, but that's more of a halo effect kind of thing to get people in the ecosystem and (eventually) switch to iOS.

I frequent mostly heavy metal pubs and for the last 5 years neither shazam nor sound hound has detected a single song for anyone near me. Complete crap. We've been using the ancient technique of asking the DJ on the way to the bar.

Some genres are definitely trickier to identify than others. EDM and heavy metal being two of the most difficult for example. I find the short segments are a little less unique. Try letting go the app get the full 10 seconds - the longer the better. Source: I used to work on algos at SoundHound. And I like these genres too :(

shazam algo have been reverse engineered. nothing stops someone to create another shazam in case apple screw it.

SoundHound is much better.

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