Personally I would never allow any app to use my microphone all the time, effectively being able to monitor a certain area around the device it is running on all the time. This is gross.

This is all the more true for an app from a company that did transfer sensitive user data to third parties in the past.[0]

In Germany, under certain circumstances, it is also illegal to make sound recordings of persons without their knowledge.[1] This might be the case in other jurisdictions too.

[0] http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=auto&tl=en&...

[1| German Civil Law Code § 201 
– Breach of confidentiality of the word: http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=auto&tl=en&...

When it goes to these things, I love Germany. I wish more countries were so respectful of human rights.

My first job was at a record store. The owners were an old man and his wife.

The old man was essentially Shazam personified. It was amazing. He could name any song, composer and artist after listening to a few beats. Except he would do it with old jazz artists and big band music.

Coincidentally the old man had huge ears. Enormous.

And when you'd ask him how he could remember all those songs, the wife would chime in, "It's cause of his ears. The songs all stay in his ears. Bouncing around."

The record store is long gone and the space is now occupied by a Cold Stone Creamery.

Whelp, that pretty much obsoletes my app http://audentifi.com :(

Time to evolve!

Not really. The app only picks up music from ambient mic input. Your app looks like something I've needed for a while though!

I just found out - it seems like an oversight on their part.

Can you tell us how you are doing this? Do you have an own database with which you compare the music to ?

The actual identification of individual songs is done using the Echonest API (they have a huge database of song hashes).

Before this can be done however, the placement of each song within the audio track as a whole needs to be determined, which is done with a combination of ffmpeg and C. Currently this process is quite slow and inaccurate - I'm trying to learn some ML theory at the moment with the hope of improving it!

I've made my own audio fingerprinting software in Python under the MIT license, check it out!

https://github.com/worldveil/dejavu

Great work and a really interesting read! Really nice performance too - for reference Echonest advises samples be 30s or longer for optimum recognition.

Hm, so is this app running and listening in to the mic constantly? (Also: Extra network traffic and cpu activity.)

Yes, but there is an on/off switch which presumably stops this activity. The energy impact in mavericks while "listening" is hovering around 2 on my machine. For comparison, Safari is at 8.

The difference is Safari is doing something immensily useful, whereas Shazam is a gimmick.

That and, constant audio surveillance (even with "an option to turn it off")? No thanks...

My first thought as well. This could be used as constant surveillance tool if Shazam chose/was forced to shared the uploaded data with GCHQ/NSA </paranoid-theory>

Of course. How else are Shazam going to make money? They need to listen to you, process the audio using a natural language processing procedure, and then target advertising at you.

Can confirm that they're pursuing this business model: particularly to see what TV ads you're being exposed to. Coverage from existing sources is panel based with low sample sizes that do not extend well into more targeted research.

I can't say for sure but from reading the description is sounds like it and I'm not downloading it for the reason. They need to make it clear.

The same statement can be said about the mobile apps. Also, Shazam is now baked into Siri.

AFAIK, the mobile apps only listen to the microphone when the app is open, not in the background

They can listen in the background and Shazam will do this if you enable Automatic mode, though the iOS status bar turns red while the microphone is being accessed by a backgrounded app.

This is incorrect. They added background listening months ago.

I'm glad they haven't added this creepy feature to Android yet

I wonder what the most common use case is for this? It's rare that I'm in front of my computer, there's music, and I have no way of determining what it is.

The mobile version makes -more- sense to me.

People on laptops in coffee shops?

Students?

Why fingerprint audio with Shazam when you can do it yourself?

I've made my own audio fingerprinting software in Python under the MIT license, check it out!

https://github.com/worldveil/dejavu

Works well. Minor nitpick: needs a dark icon option. It's the only colour menu bar extra I have.

With dark mode in Yosemite I've got a feeling devs will need to either do a dark and light version of menu bar icons or go all color. Currently my menu bar is useless in dark mode as I can't see any icons.

Wish it could pick up music from internal audio. Plenty of times I've wanted to try detecting music in YouTube videos.

SoundFlower does this, it's open source. It contains a decent chunk of audio routing features that are inexplicably missing from the core OS X.

For instance, you can route application audio out to a Soundflower channel and use that as input for another app.

Edit: just checked, Soundflower rerouting works perfectly with the Shazam Mac app, tried it out on a couple of YouTube songs, and it got it right on 47 out of the current top 50. It's a shame that Shazam is still only useful for mainstream stuff, when I tried it on some random metal, Goa, soundtracks, and industrial... 0 out of 15.

It's recently become really good at electronic music since they signed a deal with Beatport: http://news.beatport.com/blog/2013/02/06/beatport-x-shazam-a...

I use sound flower all the time. Great app!

http://audentifi.com does this :)

I must have skipped over the article as I assumed it could pick up on internal audio. Seems like an oversight...

You can do this (and a ton of different cool stuff) with RogueAmoeba's Audio Hijack Pro app, which lets you route audio from one app to another, optionally applying some filters to it. I sometimes use it to fix audio out-of-sync problems in certain videos.

Edit: As commenter above noted, the audio routing functionality is also available with the free Soundflower app.

Assuming you have the volume up, why can't it pick that up from the speaker?

It can, and it does. Well, it just did for me anyway.

No speakers on my desktop sadly.

Well it's definitely picking up what I'm listening to on both Spotify and Youtube with my headphones on.

I've always liked Shazam but I like what http://www.soundhound.com/ did with their app better.

Anyone know what the timer is? Could it be a timer for usage per day? I can't seem to find anything about paying them for it.

It's the countdown until the mic switches off again. You may not want to keep the line open all the time, it may prevent your computer from going into power saving mode (not sure), and Shazam probably doesn't want everyone to hit their servers constantly either.

But if you switch it off and on again the timer starts anew, so it's not a per-user limit.

Is there the equivalent for Windows?

Perhaps not quite the equivalent, but there is a "Modern UI Style" app: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-gb/app/shazam/5593d150-...