>This was the smart approach when Shazam launched in 2008.
A noteworthy mention would be that Sony's TrackID did most likely the same thing on their feature phones a few years before Shazam.
A noteworthy mention would be that Sony's TrackID did most likely the same thing on their feature phones a few years before Shazam.
I worked on all the Java infrastructure around the recognition cluster (the latter being handcrafted C and assembly, optimised for specific Intel hardware).
The thing that Shazam got right was not just the core recognition tech, but the business processes and supporting systems around it. I remember how much work Chris had to do to convince the 4 major mobile networks in the UK to give Shazam the same 2580 dialing code (the middle 4 buttons, top to bottom, on an early 2000s feature phone).
A major part of the business is the constant sourcing and ingestion of the latest music, in all target markets (think Afrikaans pop in South Africa), deals with pluggers and record labels, etc. Initially, the back catalog was ripped from CD by a huge team of people in a warehouse, on custom workstations.
Edit: tho for sure, the Philips algorithm was better than either of ours.
And I might be confusing them with another group but I thought, at the time, they were doing some goofy hash of the highest energy Fourier components -- a source of entertainment in our office. ;-)
I think Geoff had the vision and algorithm from the 90s as part of an ISEF project (!?). We had funding in 2001, when we got the real world go-to-your-car-and-get-a-cd and then we identify it ... using the audio signal alone.... demo working.
With a corpus of hundreds of thousands of songs. Positive match in less than 2 seconds.
Sadly, in 2001 there's no market for such whizbang amazing tech.
Shazam only launched one year after that, maybe the problem was in the marketing not the market itself?