FWIW, inventing something from scratch, as far as I understand things, will only save you from copyrighted code etc. It won't save you from overly general, and trivial patents.

Good luck though :/

Exactly. Be prepared to be bullied by Shazam -- at least, that's what happened the last time someone posted audio fingerprinting code online. And inventing something yourself doesn't save you from patents. I'll be watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out.

I seriously hope this is good enough even for the lawyerly folks out there.

It's probably the biggest thing to happen in this space since the release of the iPhone version of Shazam!

Who uses Shazam anymore? SoundHound is way ahead in recognition capability, especially in noisy environments.

Whenever I have a chance to use both, it's seriously a tossup- it depends on the song, environment, and phone, but they're usually equivalent in my experience.

The main reason I use Shazam over SoundHound is simply that SoundHound doesn't have a Windows Phone 7 app.