Comment by subtech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subtech | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN!

So I’ve been working on this project where you can search for similar-sounding songs.

Basically, you enter the name of a song in a search bar, and it will use an audio-based search algorithm to return a list of other songs that sound similar.

Since the similarity search is audio-based, it attempts to prioritize songs with similar melodies, beats, and feel, irrespective of their popularity.

Here are a few example searches for similar songs:

- Fetish (feat. Gucci Mane) - Selena Gomez: https://maroofy.com/songs/1563859943

- Faded - Alan Walker: https://maroofy.com/songs/1087732055

- Bandit - Juice Wrld: https://maroofy.com/songs/1577864923

- L.I.F.E - Remady & Manu-L: https://maroofy.com/songs/1170014710

- A chill instrumental track: https://maroofy.com/songs/1592077074

It’s still a very rough prototype, but thought it would be nice to share it here to get some early feedback! :)

Some current limitations:

- Sometimes, the results may contain similar songs that are duplicates under a different name

Really cool project and happy to provide some feedback! I like the simple but clean interface.

I'm having decent success for searched songs so far. Sometimes I'm not sure why the top songs were picked for similarity but as I go further down the list I can start to hear some similar sounds, but I guess that's just my subjective opinion so I'm not sure how helpful that is.

I looked up Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", and the top result had a VERY similar accompaniment, which was great to hear. But then listening to the next one down on the list, it's the exact same song mislabeled as a completely different one, not sure what happened there, or if that's a bug in the sound loading logic (looking up that song on Youtube it is totally different). Also was surprised going down that list how many singers have similar voices to Roy Orbison, unless that's also mislabeling? Not sure what to think there.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! :)

Yeah, currently the indexed catalog has some metadata issues, where some songs can have the wrong audio associated with them.

And since the search algorithm is only audio-based, this can cause it to return results where the audio is similar but the associated song/artist name for that audio is incorrect. This can also cause issues such as having duplicates of the same song under different names, etc.

I definitely agree that this can be confusing, and I’m still trying to figure out a way to best address this issue.

And the search ranking algorithm can definitely be improved too! :)

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