Hear It, Record It and SHAZAM, You Got It

Imagine yourself in the following situations and just try to think what is common to all of them :

• On the way to or from work you hear an amazing track on the radio that you’ve heard many times before and you really liked. You would love to get hold of this track for your iPod but you just don’t know the name of track or the artist.
• You are at a club or at a bar having a good time with your friends and you hear a track that catches your fancy, it would be great if you could catch hold of that track to add it to your collection but again “How do you find out the track information ? “

The above are just a few scenarios where you just wished that there was a way you could find out the track information of the song you were hearing. Well, if you’re still wishing then it’s get ready to rejoice cause your prayers have just been answered. Shazam ID, Music ID or Track ID are the latest technologies that allow people to find out the track information of any song just by recording the first few seconds of that song. Pioneered and developed by Shazam Entertainment, a privately held company headquartered in London, this technology is designed for mobile handsets which have access to the internet.

So how does one use Music Id. Simple, the Music Id application resides on your phone which has access to the internet either via GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi. As soon as you hear a song that you like, you turn on the application and choose the option to find the music id of the song. As soon as you do this the application records the song for 5 seconds, sends the data to a database and within the next 5 seconds you have the information about the song that you were looking for. So basically in just 10 seconds one can find out all the information about a particular track. Shazam uses a patented fingerprinting technology that recognizes practically any audio that is within the recognition database very quickly and with a very small amount of audio even under heavy noise. Shazam’s internals are, no doubt, “commercially confidential“, however there is some information on possible algorithms available on the web.

The basic game is to compute a spectrogram at points of peak intensity in the music; the argument here is that a piece of music is, roughly speaking, characterized by how the loudest bits sound. At each peak in each piece of music, the spectrogram is divided into 180 buckets with frequencies between 200 and 2000Hz, and an entire piece of music is described by a sequence of such 180-value spectrograms, stored with their time position in the song. Matching is done by computing a similar sequence of spectrograms from the query (as recorded from your telephone or whatever) and searching for similar spectrograms in the database of known songs (sure, all this is not so easy to understand for the layman, but see here if you wish to know more technical details).

Shazam ID or Music ID is now available for a number of different phone models and was recently also introduced for the iPhone. It’s a really cool application and is great way to impress your friends or even win over people that you may like. The video below shows a practical use case of Music Id as well as a demonstration.

Looks great doesn’t it. So now the next time you need to find something about a track that you hear, just relax and Shazam it.

Delhi Planet Weekend Trivia

Here it is and this goes out to all you technokrats and teknokrats out there. Connect the three pictures below,there is something that is common between them.

While you excercise those relaxed neurons and prepare them for the week ahead here’s some information regarding the Delhi Planet Weekend Specials. Starting from today, every weekend you would get to read about something different that you didn’t know of or something that isn’t common knowledge. This would range from the latest technological trends to biographies about people and organizations who have significantly contributed to society,and if there is something big happening over the weekend then you can expect DP to publish an exclusive review .So Stay Tuned cause just like the earth the planet is getting hotter as well.

Now coming back to the question, chances are that if you have figured out the names of the countries then google or wiki would have helped you figure out the answer ,if not then here it is. The first country is the Federated States of Micronesia followed by Armenia and finally Tuvalu.So what, you may say.Well if you find out what the domain name extensions of these countries are you would get the catch ,cause they are .fm, .am and .tv. All these are exceptionally small countries and make significant amounts of money just because their domain names can be used and booked by anyone.So much so that about 50% of micronesia’s economy is dependent on the use of the .fm domain name,which is used by fm stations around the world.

Speaking of fm,the past few months have seen a sudden explosion in the number of fm channels in delhi.While a few years back there were only 2-3 major players,it’s now doubled to 7 primetime fm channels. These consist of Star Tv’s 91.1 Fm,92.7 Fm by the ADAG, the India Today Group’s 93.5 fm, 94.3 Fm by BBC, Hit 95 fm(and it’s still a puzzle as to who owns this channel), 98.3 fm by the Times group and the latest entrant being Fever 104 powered by Virgin Music and the Hindustan Times which is emerging as one of the best channels to listen too. And guess what they even teach you “how to turn on a virgin”,check here.

Well I hope that charged those sleepy neurons in your head,cause it’s back to work tomorrow. Happy Monday.