I believe it's very sensitive to changes in timing, so it doesn't work on live performances etc.
(based on reading I did 13 years ago before an interview at Shazam, which to this day still remains my worst interview performance)
What we do is calculate the acoustic fingerprint of every uploaded content and compare/check for duplicates (only authorized staff can upload, but this still helps a bunch with user errors and in cases where you need to reupload a track). Then we compare the fingerprints, using this[1] approach, so we can fine-tune the similarity based on our needs.
In our case it's been very effective. Yes, live versions are treated as different ones (which is exactly what we need in our case, so it's a feature for us), but mechanical differences between tracks (volume, slight distortions from codec, different compression levels or remasters, or track being cut differently) are just ignored.
If you ever want/need audio fingerprinting, I can warmly recommend it.
[0] Music streaming service optimized for cafes, restaurants and other venues - https://musicbox.com.hr/ [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/acoustid/Uq_ASjaq3bw/k...
I think you're talking about a live recording vs a studio recording? But what I think zelos was talking about was "someone is currently playing music live, what is it?", which is a lot harder because you need to recognize the essence of a song and not the essence of a recording of a song.
As far as I can tell these operate on audio, not symbolic music.
One of these might match random points in many songs, but a far smaller subset of these will have the same three in the same sequence.
I noodled around with this idea in my free time a few years ago, got absolutely nowhere really usable with it (I probably put in a couple hundred hours).
I knew I was limited by my dataset (small), code quality (terrible) and understanding of musical theory (virtually nil).
Maybe I'll pick up that idea again - even doing beat matching would be kind of neat.
They must have loads of data on songs people actually want to know yet never really managed to turn themselves into anything more sophisticated.
Yeah - I think it's magic as well.
Other thoughts: I used it back in the UK when it launched, and the first track I ever used it on dialling (2580 - the numbers down the middle of your keypad) was also a French track (MC Solaar – La Vie Est Belle)
I always felt they missed a trick, just identifying music (and then trying to sell you stuff). Surely they could have used the same tech to seamlessly mix all music together. (i.e. take the sequences within tracks they find hard to differentiate, and then use these points to allow two tracks to be mixed together). What's the minimum number of tracks it would say take to seamlessly mix from Megadeth to Mozart?