Music Fingerprinting System - Music Digital Naming Service (MusicDNS)
| A digital music identification system that can search through 17 million songs in under 1 second has been launched in the US. MusicIP, based in California, US, announced last week that it had received a US patent for its method of automatically identifying, or "fingerprinting", digital music files. The company already offers software that analyses the music collection on a computer, identifies it, and makes recommendations. But now it will now offer its music identification feature for other companies to include in their products. The system can recognise a song from its audio "fingerprint" in a fraction of a second. This allows users to rapidly organise their music collection, discover more about a particular track or get new recommendations, through connected databases, regardless of the format of the audio file. Matthew Dunn, chief executive of MusicIP, claims his company's fingerprinting technology is the fastest available and uses the largest commercial database – containing 17 million songs. To make a fingerprint, MusicIP quickly scans the first 2 minutes of a track and records frequency data every 185 milliseconds, before compressing the results into a 512 byte file. It also measures records the four most dominant tones in the first 30 seconds of the music. The program uses information about these dominant tones to narrow the search before searching the song database using the frequency information. Dunn says this allows the company to perform hundreds of searches each second and that the service is sensitive enough to distinguish between different versions of the same tune, such as live and studio recordings. While other companies (Shazam Entertainment, in London, UK & Gracenote, in California, US) use digital fingerprints to identify songs, the databases they claim are much smaller. An alternative approach is user collaboration. Online services such as Audioscrobbler and Pandora, for example, recognise songs and make recommendations by searching through user-generated playlists. But Dunn hopes the speed and size of MusicIP's database will make it stand out. Companies must pay a license fee to access MusicIP’s Music Digital Naming Service service, but non-profit organisations can access it for free. This was seized 4 u at New Scientist & MusicIP |
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