Comments on: Shazam iPhone App Review

By: Steven Harris

Steven Harris — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:34:00 +0000

I find it works on a pretty wide variety of music, but is bad with indie labels and foreign recordings.

By: Jerad Hill

Jerad Hill — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:35:54 +0000

Really? I have all types of music, Jazz and classical included and it works fine. I will add that voice recognition plays a part in quickly identifying a song but not necessary. Of course the music has to be searchable in order for it to work with the app. It’s not meant to be able to tell you the name of a song being played in a small bar outside of your city limits.

By: A

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 01:55:29 +0000

It is cool, but only works with pop music, it is weak for jazz, folk, and piss-poor for classical (I am guessing not a big part of Jerad’s collection). It has had time in noisy places unless you get right by a speaker. The technology underlying this is cool, but not that hard to understand. My best guess is that it creates a hash value based on the waveform for the sampling period which is compared to a database. Not that different from how geneticists search a large body of biological sequence with a small section. It, therefore, requires the each recording be cataloged and hashed. So multiple versions of the same some by the same artist need to hashed individually. This would also explain why less popular music is less available. SInce this work is driven as marketing tool, the cost-benefit ratio is too small to work on large catalogs of older, less popular music. It is not as I have seen in some postings that, for example classical music, is too complicated, it is an economic or licensing decision.

By: Jerad Hill

Jerad Hill — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:10:07 +0000

Check out Robert’s while driving review of Shazam, ha!

http://www.viddler.com/explore/sandieman/videos/435/

Thanks for the Viddler friend add Robert!

http://www.viddler.com/jeradhill/

By: DBush

DBush — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:12:42 +0000

Jerad: Thx for covering Shazam! It seems like a pretty awesome app. kinda mind-blowing.

Now all I need is an iPhone!!!!

FYI: while on the App Store this morning I noticed Midomi does the same thing but also allows you to Hum or sing the song (say if you’ve got a tune stuck in your head). If you’re bored you should check it out and do a comparison. Personally, just looking at the screenshots Shazam looks better IMO.