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Comment by Sesse__ | Hacker News Reader

For me, mostly a lot of false negatives. I have a Pixel 8, and I have no problems using the microphone normally, but somehow, Merlin requires the bird to be within a couple of meters of me and sing for quite a while before Merlin will even say “hearing a bird”. And of course, you have to be dead silent; if anyone talks or coughs, it will mess up the spectogram badly.

Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” and Shazam is just amazingly resistant to noise, it's a bit disappointing :-)

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I think what makes Shazam magically "just work" is that they are searching for the exact embedding of the recorded version of the song - it doesn't work for a cover version, acapella, etc even if it is very similar. (Everyone would want an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song, but I guess it's a very tough problem.)

Merlin is solving the more general problem so makes sense that it's much more finicky and less accurate.

> an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song

YouTube Music and Google Search do OK with these types. Sometimes if I know a song well enough, I will open YT Music, activate the mic search, and sing a few bars, instead of typing the song title.

According to Gemini, SoundHound is also a good app for song-hummers to try.

Still, we're talking orders of magnitude here. I've fed Shazam with a stream of the cheapest lapel microphone you could get, mounted behind a rack filled with twelve very noisy servers, in a hall filled with 5000 people also all being noisy, and it would reliably recognize music from the other side of that hall before I could do so myself (I had to walk halfway there to hear “oh, yes, it's actually right”). And that's on a stream encoded with 9600bps GSM compression. With Merlin, I can hold out my phone on a silent day, hear the bird loud and clear and it will hardly register.

Shazam primarily identifies on the geometry of spectogram peaks, FWIW (I wrote my master's thesis on the DSP of music recognition back in the day; it's possible that they are doing something more fancy now, of course, but I'm not sure if they would want to). I don't know exactly what Merlin is doing.

I'm not sure why but this seems very phone dependent. I can stand next to another person, both running Merlin in silence, and mine will pick up much more than some people's phones. My phone is not particularly new (Zenfone 8).

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