"Fingerprinting" of Audio Files? 127
Pseudonymous Coward writes: "This could be interesting: 'Tuneprint is an audio fingerprinting algorithm. It takes the unique 'fingerprint' of a sound clip, which can then be compared to a fingerprint database to get more information about the clip, like title and artist, lyrics, URLs, related music, copyright status, or almost anything else. The fingerprint doesn't change even if the sound is compressed, converted to a different file format, broadcast over the radio, and so on.'"
Re:Sceptical - Remember watermarks on images? (Score:3)
FAQ:
If watermarks are steganography, fingerprints are more like hashes or CRCs. If you have a perfect fingerprint, the fingerprint being separate from the song, you'd have to make the song not sound like itself in order to stop it from being recognized.
Of course, we have yet to see how good Tuneprint is, but it sounds pretty cool. And it wouldn't be hard to build up a database with a bunch of CDs and CDDB.
This is for real, friends (Score:5)
Hiya. My name is Geoff and Tuneprint is my baby which some excellent and astonishing friends at MIT are helping me deliver.
I'd already been up all night when the story was posted at 7am. I'm going to try to stumble my way through a few points, get some breakfast, and try to answer people's questions as soon as I can get to it.
First of all, this is not a hoax. Wow, hair triggers :) Yeah, I was sleep deprived whilst writing most of the website. Yeah, the barcode in the logo is '31337 24816'.. get it.. eleet powers of two. eleet two-to-the-n's. eleet two-n's. eleet tunes. yeah. well. you had to be there. and jamie's to blame for the 24816 pun :) Don't hold it against us that we're not suits.
The general idea is pretty simple. We take the input audio. We condition it (adjust it to a known sampling rate and volume.) We pass it through the psychoacoustic model (it's about a notch more complicated than what you'd see in a mp3 encoder, which ain't saying much. This is all stuff that was mostly hashed out decades ago.) This model effectively strips the parts of the sound you can't hear -- the desired result being that even if the audio has been compressed or manipulated subaudibly, the result is still the same. Okay, so the net result of all of this is a vector that covers a very small segment (fraction of a second) of audio. We stack several of these vectors (possibly separated in time by a bit) side-by-side to get a big vector. Then we do completely boring and standard and well-understood statistical and pattern-matching stuff on the vector to make it smaller and more palatable for the server -- think of it as lossy compression. Then it goes off to the server. The server is about equal in complexity to a text search engine. (I say this fully realizing that I have only a vague impression how Google works. It's certainly a lot more complicated than the obvious hash-table-of-sorted-lists stuff.) It finds the database vector that's the best match in a fairly boring but efficient way. (No, it does not involve searching through all tracks one by one, no more than Altavista searches through all web pages one by one every time you want to find some porn.) Call the result a submatch. Back at the client, the whole process is repeated a bunch more times, generating a stream of submatches ("Radiohead offset 0.. Radiohead offset 1024 or 16384.. Slashdot's Gr34test Hits 5262324.. Radiohead offset 3072..") from the input audio stream. Then, the client looks at the submatches and tries to figure out what the input audio was and where the song boundaries are (did somebody really stick in a sample from Slashdot's Gr34test Hits, or was that just an unlucky match?)
See? Not magic. It's a challenging problem, but not an impossible problem. The reason that this doesn't exist right now is not that generations of scientists have tried and failed, but rather that people didn't care too much until lately and nobody's gotten off their ass and done anything about it yet. I like big but approachable problems, which is one of the reasons I'm excited about this.
FOR ALL OF YOU WHO FELL ASLEEP THROUGH THAT: YOU CANNOT ADD AN INAUDIBLE TONE TO THE MUSIC AND BREAK TUNEPRINT. THE FINGERPRINT IS BASED ON THE LARGE-SCALE PSYCHOACOUSTIC FEATURES OF THE MUSIC. IF MP3 ENCODERS CAN DO IT, SO CAN WE. Maybe not perfectly, but enough to have a fighting chance. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT HERE.
jen is telling me to go to breakfast but I want to say one more thing, which is that y'all should also pay attention to the second of our two goals as listed in the FAQ, which is to get this tech and access to a nice, well-maintained central database out into the hands of everybody, commerical and open source, major label and independent, so that people can go do lots of cool stuff with it. I don't want this to end up controlled by a single organization that permits its use only in ways that further its private agenda.
Hint: I know that there are sekrit batcave startups that are working on the same thing, because we're starting to bump into them.
Oh yeah. Also like I say in the FAQ, it's not done. No promises. I like the current algorithm; it reflects the wisdom of throwing several other stabs away in disgust. I like the very limited performance data we have. I like the mathematical theory. We haven't scaled it very far yet, though, and it may all come toppling down. In which case we'll pick up the pieces and try again. But I'm confident we'll pull off something cool, because, well, 70% of what we want to do isn't that hard. The other 30% is a bitch and will require cleverness, work, and chutzpah, but even the 70% is going to be a damn useful tool. And this project has started to catch the eyes of some pretty f*cking brilliant techincal people, in my opinion, so I think we're all over that 30%.
breakfast now. more later :)
geoff
PS: if you've emailed me in the past few days, and I haven't gotten back to you, I'm sorry -- things are pretty hectic around here. I really hope to burn through the backlog this afternoon before I get to the slashdot stuff. thanks :)
Ever wonder if you get a nice warning email before you show up on slashdot? the answer would be 'no' :p
Please, everybody, stop confusing fingerprints (Score:4)
A fingerprint is an inherent property of a file, much like your own fingerprints are inherent properties of your fingers. Both kind of fingerprints are used to identify things. A cryptographic hash is a kind of fingerprint. If two files have the same hash they are likely to be identical.
A watermark is a piece of information artificially added to a file. They are akin of watermarks on dollar bills. There is one difference though. Digital watermarks are designed for difficulty of removal, while watermarks on money are designed for difficulty of reproduction. Watermarks are used to certify autenticity of things. A cryptographic signature is a kind of watermark. It can certify that I, not somebody else, signed some file.
--
ouch!? (Score:2)
I agree this could be cool though I have not seen many un-tagged MP3 files.
But now, if we consider (in this context) that a song is a bit of WAV data of any duration that will be hashed on some way with this system in order to be identified, there could then be another use for this system:
Couldn't some copyright organism use it automatically in order to recognize any sample they would contain and finally claim some royalties in the name of their orignal creator ?
After all, this is not quite different from what the ear actually does while hearing a song, especially when it happens to "recognize" a sample.
If this is the case, then I believe that sample scramblers might become quite frequent in the future.
--
Re:Darn... (Score:1)
Sure.. that's a problem, but you're missing the REAL flaw in this tool:
"By throwing away all of the 'uninteresting' parts of the signal, the software is left with only the characteristics that uniquely identify the track."
This means that every N'Sync, B2B, and Backstreet Boys song will have the same fingerprint! What a disaster!
--------------------------------------
Re:RIAA (Score:2)
Remember, current copyright law and current technology allow the RIAA to go after people who download songs to which they have no right. But hitting 20 million users is hard, so the RIAA wants to establish that they can choke the servers, too.
The major anti-piracy use of this, I suspect, would be to set up "stings": The RIAA posts anonymously a song whose fingerprint includes "I am not a legal copy!" to a site trading in songs. Then anyone found to have the copy can be assumed to have downloaded it or copied it from someone who did... but that sounds more like a watermark than a fingerprint.
like I really believe that (Score:1)
Re:in reference to Napster's appeal? (Score:2)
To allow this, Napster (or any other) will have to download the MP3 and compute the fingerprint. Downloading all MP3s which are exchanged via Napster will need a huge bandwidth update.
It would take a lot more than that! Right now, MP3 files on Napster are traded peer-to-peer, with only the filename/duration/bitrate/MD5sum being transmitted to Napster. If Napster wants to get, say, a 10-second sample of each of the songs on my hard drive through my 56k modem (33.6 maximum uplink), it would take something like 10 s/file * 128kbps (approx) * 1700 files (approx) / 33.6kbps = 64761 s (or about 18 hours). And that's under ideal upload conditions!
And since I don't actually use Napster (I use OpenNap [sourceforge.net]) that makes it even harder. :-)
Also, what about files that are incomplete? One of my pet peeves about Napster (and OpenNap) right now is that there are still a substantial number of incomplete files out there. I hate downloading a file and discovering that it's cut off halfway through the song. If you fingerprint a file based on a sample, then this does nothing at all to combat the incomplete file problem -- a partial song would potentially have the same fingerprint as a complete song.
Another similar point: sometimes (rarely) I intentionally omit the first few seconds of a track when I rip from CD, because I don't enjoy sitting through 3-30 seconds of silence. (And I omitted the first couple seconds of Depeche Mode's "I Feel For You" because it's a horrible screeching sound, which I assumed was some kind of joke to scare vinyl users.) If you try to fingerprint the first few seconds of a song, then either (a) you end up fingerprinting silence, or (b) you get misleading results if those first seconds are stripped.
Likewise, if you try to fingerprint, say, from 30s to 40s into a song, then you fail for any song that's less than 30 seconds long.
Re:Not That Far-Fetched (Score:2)
That was the first thing we tried: have a set of 'classifiers', each of which makes a yes-no decision about the spectrum it sees over a short time interval. Hash together the results of all of the classifiers, and poof. The classifiers were built by automatically analyzing a lot of music to find critera that were stable but widely distributed.
The problem is wobble (aka fencepost error). What happens if the original, undistorted version of the track classifies as a one with a given classifier, but is really close to flipping over to a zero given just a little push? You lose, that's what, and have to fingerprint both possibilities and put them into the database. And usually there are many different opportunities for wobble if you're checking enough different criteria to build a useful fingerprint. So the next thing to try was only using the foo most 'confident' (unwobbly) classifiers in the hash. But then of course selecting those is wobbly. So you 'debounce' it by having different 'enter set of current classifiers' and 'leave set of current classifiers' criteria. Still too wobbly, and now the code is a complete mess.
So everything was redesigned to use a different and far simpler and elegant approach. The downside is that we now assume the server is a little intelligent and knows how to do a bit of fuzzymatching. See rant posted elsewhere.
Re:Sceptical - Remember watermarks on images? (Score:1)
I wonder, how important are ALL the bits of a music file, compressed or raw?
If the fingerprint is nothing more than some sort of hash, then it could easily be defeated by the steganographic trick of manipulating the low-order bits. In a photographic image, this introduces such minimal noise that it's imperceptable to humans, and it gives you a place to hide your own data (i.e., watermarks).
Could this method be used to beat the fingerprinting algorithm? Or would it introduce perceptable noise to the recording?
Of course, if the fingerprint isn't a hash, and makes use of this trick in the first place, it's really nothing to pull out the fingerprint.
Re:This is for real, friends (Score:4)
I think I can help explain- let me put it this way. I've got a tune (obLink: see URL link above) called "Rain Dragon". There's a point toward the beginning where a 'mutating' synthesiser tone enters with a sort of warpy noise, on a beat that kicks really hard with bass drum and a splash cymbal. The total impact is quite aggressive- the synth sort of bursts in, and does so in a way that defines the range of unusual sounds that patch can produce.
Take that as an example sound snippet to work with. Now, let's say for the sake of argument that the impact of the splash and bassdrum and synth are all perfectly synchronised (splash and bassdrum are in fact sequenced and are perfectly synchronised to within MIDI spec, synth was a lucky hit that seemed to link up extra nicely). Call the phase of the splash's initial attack A, the phase of the bassdrum B, the phase of the attack of the synth C. These may all be in phase, adding up to a big transient. Some may be out of phase- for instance, the splash may come through unaltered but the syn attack and bassdrum attack may be going opposite directions and cancel each other out.
This is a very large level feature of the waveform- to alter it you would have to do such violence to the waveform as to render it unlistenable. Nothing you can do is going to make that syn attack and bassdrum attack be in different phase- obliterate the bass and you have a wimpy thin version of the same musical event signature, listen to it on a transistor radio and you have mostly the overtones and some distortions on the same musical event signature, record the transistor radio and it's the same deal- the LARGE SCALE waveform shapes are going to have a recognisable pattern if the music itself is still recognisable at all. In the crudest possible form you'd have to physically edit out certain drum hits or notes to alter the recognition- the crudest possible form for this type of identification is, say, MIDI. If there's a particularly interesting drum fill in something you can sequence it painstakingly in MIDI (not quantising but accurately placing each drum event in time) and get an instantly recognisable 'copy' of the original recording despite obliterating even the very sounds themselves and falling back on nothing but timing alone...
There's a great deal of pre-existing work in other fields, such as image tracking, that defines fingerprinting as 'imposing a subtle added signal onto the media and then reading it back'. That's a far cry from what you're doing- might I suggest 'bodyprinting' instead? ;) after all, what you're doing is much closer to plunking the 'body' of a music snippet down in sand and recording the large scale attributes. It doesn't much matter what the details are. If you mixed one tune with a different tune, the 'bodyprint' of the one would gradually fade (not be instantly obliterated!) by increasing loudness of the other, and at the halfway point you'd be getting a 'bodyprint' that registered about equally for BOTH tunes (!).
Now that you have this concept so nicely worked out, what do you intend to do with it? Are you going to give to the record industry the ability to track down unauthorised music wherever it may present itself- most notably, to identify samples used in other songs and bring lawsuits over them?
I was trying to think of other ways the RIAA could abuse this technology, but I drew a blank- because at this time it's not necessary to _prove_ a music copy is from a particular source, to bring suit. Nobody has argued that britney spears mp3s are NOT the same tune as the original CDs because it's stupidly obvious that they're effectively the same tune. Hence, this process simply adds a level of certainty to a process of identification that's already enough to stand up in court. Is there any likelihood of this level of authentication of a copy becoming necessary in practice?
Re:Serialnumbers (Score:2)
cached fingerprints via cryptographic hashes (Score:1)
okay, I just want to point something out really quick: if you take the cryptographic hash of a mp3, then you can fingerprint every unique mp3 (not song) in the world only once and keep it in a database. don't have to recalc it each time. you can take the hash of any mp3 you find and know that you have the same mp3 trusted-authority had when they fingerprinted it.
ah, you say, but the clients will just lie about the hash of the mp3 files they're serving! well, I was thinking about that, and I think I can see a really simple way to design a 'challenge hash' algorithm. the server asks for a random 1k block from the file, and the client has to send that block and send proof that that data, combined with the rest of the data in the file, could possibly hash together to give the hash the client sent originally. the client can only do this if it's true. now, all you have to do is stop the client from saying one thing to the server and something else to everybody else. presumably you do this by making the protocol to randomly check up on the mp3's you're serving the same as the protocol to download one of the mp3's you're serving.
these are just random schemes; i haven't tried them or really even thought them through. maybe if I have time someday :)
Copying Vinyl is NOOOO problem (Score:3)
Ahem.
I have converted a number of my old vinyl records to CD and MP3 format. It is rather simple, actually:
... and listen to the music as often as you like without damaging the master media.
Re:Not quite perfect (Score:1)
> the info might be stored modulated on a 50 hertz signal that we can't hear
No. It's pattern matching, not stenography. Tuneprint doesn't change the audio in any way. Rather, you essentially send your mp3 to a tuneprint server and ask the server 'what do you think this sounds like?' and the server says 'oh I know, it's kruder & dorfmeister remixing bomb the bass's bug powder dust'. of course you don't send the whole track, just the 'fingerprint' that uniquely identifies it, but you get the idea.
That means you don't have to modify tracks beforehand. That means you can use it on all the stuff on napster right this instant. And that also means that there's no watermark that a sufficiently clever attacker can strip. (Instead, an attacker would want to subtly change the audio so that the fingerprint is fooled but quality isn't degraded. Psychoacoustics gives us lots of tools to try to stop people from doing this.)
Really (Score:2)
The kicker is this- there will still be a huge false positive count. Consider this- I own a Proteus/1 synth. Some sounds I have modified and altered, but some I use 'stock'. Play a certain note or melody with a certain sound and BAM- "Excuse me, we can legally prove you sampled 'j_random_80s_band', see you in court". Playing an acoustic instrument, it's very unlikely that you'll exactly duplicate a waveform simply by playing the same notes, but with sample-based synthesizer modules that ship with ROM banks?
Cue Cat TV<-->Computer Interface (Score:1)
I've been speculating on this for a couple of days. I'm wondering if the Digital Convergence [digitalconvergence.com] software :CRQ [crq.com] doesn't already do something like the software mentioned in this article. Let's say an ad or show intro is fed into a signature (watermarks???) generator at 11KHz sample rate (to keep CPU usage low) then encode that signature as a CueCat trademarked
barcode (can you trademark a class of barcodes?) and matches it against a list kept on a central server.
If my guess is correct, then the methedology mentioned here has already been done and put to the worst use for a new technology - marketing.
Just a thought. Expand on it if you can. Anyone else with insight into the :CRQ methodology?
Fingerprinting (Score:1)
WHAT superfluous header data? (Score:3)
Inspect the whole file all you want- you might even see interesting wiggles in the waveform which are of course exactly the sort of thing this will pick up on. You can go in and invert chunks of those waveform wiggles, and that will render that little snippet unmatchable with the original tune- at the expense of making the audio go sputter sputter sputter. Pitch-shifting the whole tune up about 2 octaves would work too :) or timestretching it to about twice its normal length- maybe only 1 1/2 times its normal length. That would work if you like slow dancing ;) most effective? Well, you know how some mp3 files ripped off CDs go BZRRRP every now and then 'cause the CD player choked? The data formerly existing during the section where it goes BZRRRP is rendered TOTALLY UNMATCHABLE by this technique ;) therefore you can completely destroy the fingerprint by simply arranging for the rip to be 100% bzrrrrp. I think I can safely say that this would be a completely effective way of eradicating fingerprintability, at least until they start fingerprinting CD failure modes :)
Transitivity: (Score:1)
If you removed a fingerprint from the work, you essentially destroy the work. At least, from your above statement, that digital watermarks are designed for difficulty of removal.
So you can use a finger print for just about all the purposes of a watermark, when you can't use a watermark for all the purposes of a fingerprint.
Does that make sense?
The nick is a joke! Really!
Re:Not That Far-Fetched (Score:1)
AKA, in fingerprinting, you choose interesting features and landmarks because you can see the *entire* fingerprint at a time, and not by tracing the grooves; yet as far as I can see, because you're sampling across time/frequency, you're forced into something analgous to trying to find features by tracing the grooves in a fingerprint.
I can see where one would choose instrument switches, pauses in singing, rhythm changes, or something else that is suitably obvious. The only problem is how the system can identify these portions in song... I'd love to see the 'math' behind this, even if it takes a couple months of reading to actually understand it.
Of course, to cheat would create a fingerprint using some sort of GA, and select the genes that creates the most *useful* fingerprints, in terms of categorizing and identifying, and code those genes into a formal program...
The nick is a joke! Really!
Re:Fingerprint can be obscured in seconds (Score:1)
But then trolls like you like to think you can think!
why dont you first READ then type. if you notice that the addition of an infrasonic fundamental (if you have more than 32 brain cells) will alter the total fingerprint of ANY audio source. squeeze the audio out to the analog world, add the fundamental- re-encode. anyone with decent grade audio equipment can do this with no detectable changes (to the human ear... including the idiots that say they can hear the difference between brands of speaker wire).
Seeee.... in the analog world, we can undo the things that the best digital mage can do.
Also you can do a small time-shift compression that would be in-audiable and change the fingerprint.
I can think of at least 20 ways to defeat this without straining!
I just broke it (Score:1)
A radio station time comppressor would break the fingerprint too.. (notice how the radio station plays the song slightly faster than it is on cd?)
Good idea, but it aint ever going to be foolproof.
re: trying to break it (Score:1)
Simple -- fingerprint the audio *after* it comes out of the mp3 player. But yeah, you can always make your own private format, and just encrypt the data. That's fine for sharing stuff with your friends, but doesn't help too much if you want to put the songs on Napster.
As for time compression, yeah, that's one of the distortions you have to make it robust to, one way or another, just like volume change and mp3 compression. I have some strategies in mind for this but haven't run a lot of these kinds of tests.
This has been around for years... (Score:1)
...at least in the graphics world. Digimarc (http://www.digimarc.com/ [digimarc.com]) watermarking has been included in Adobe Photoshop since version 4 (maybe earlier?). The watermark can be applied to the image with minimal loss to image quality, and is very difficult to remove without seriously damaging the quality of the image.
I've wondered when music companies would start doing this to their recordings. Had Napster been able to tell the difference between freely-distributed music and illegally copied music, I'm sure they would have been much better at covering their ass. I think this is a Good Thing, and it should have been the responsibility of the record companies to come up with a similar scheme long ago. *Everyone* else in the world is expected to identify their copyrighted material as such. Why shouldn't they be?
Nothing to worry about.... (Score:1)
>What is Tuneprint?
>
>The first goal of the Tuneprint project is to develop an audio fingerprinting algorithm, that is
>to say, a computer program that can take a few seconds of music, calculate some kind of unique
>'fingerprint' of that sound
...snip...
Hmmm, haven't quite worked out the algorithm yet? A little bit like that old annoying Fermat's Last Theorem, isn't it?
"I'd show you the algorithm, but I haven't got space on my Web Server..."
Back to sleep...zzzzz
Re:Already being done (Score:1)
Cool.
I hate... (Score:1)
fingerprinting audio... (Score:2)
That reminds me one of the methods used for speech recognition: image recognition.
You convert your sound to Fourrier Domain. x=t, y=f, z(grey tone/color)=F(y)|t=x. You then have a 2-D color/grey map to recognize. And image recognition is far further than sound recognition.
So, imagine you
- FFT the music to a picture
- create a 2-D simplified image
All you still have to do to recognize the tune is check the 2D image of the unknown tune agains the saved 2D images (allowing stretch/noise,...)
Re:Get a clue (Score:1)
I can recognise a piece of audio (from just a few seconds mostly :-) whatever file format, whether been played on the radio, CD, MP3 or 8-track, and with a 90% accuracy.
So why can't an algorithm.. this isn't a watermark, it's a fingerprint. Read the site carefully...
Banner ads? (Score:2)
There's something REALY innovative going on here. For how do they fit a banner inside MP3 files? And once inside, how do they output those banners to the speakers? To top it all, these banner ads are STUPID! Wow! What guys can come up with these days to get counter-hits! In the old days, we just made a Perl-script or something, but this is REALY innovative!
However, how about adding *Ads* in MP3's that you can't hear with your conscious ear, but is dictating your life *UNCONSCIOUSLY*. Just think about it: One day you wake up from listening to music all night, and you go to the nearest MPAA/RIAA Borg-HQ to seek employment.
There's just endless possibilities, isn't there?
- Steeltoe
Not necessarily (Score:2)
Do you know every lyric, note and chord change?
Why shouldn't it be possible for a computer to do the same thing? Remember: it's not a watermark-- it's more like MD5.
Perfect for OpenNAP (Score:1)
But, if it does work as well as they say, what about displaying the song's fingerprint next to each song on an OpenNAP server? This would make it easy to verify that it's the right one before you download.
Re:Not talking about adding fingerprints/watermark (Score:2)
Dance and Trance music frequently comes with several different 'edits' of varying length depending on where they will be used. I'm sure some of these edits will share identical sections with lengths in the order of 1 minute or so.
This doesn't look very easy to do.
What would be nice would be the ability to search teh web for mp3s that sound like the ones you listen to but aren't.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:2)
Everyone in my office thought I was nuts, but a license agreement is a license agreement.
Convergent Technologies (Score:2)
CDDB + My.MP3 (+ Napster?) + bdiff = "Fingerprinting" of Audio Files.
Now we just need to solve something like:
IMDb + AltaVista/Corbis + bdiff + WhoWhere?/AnyWho
... to get Natalie Portman's home telephone number.
(Not for me, you understand, but I believe there's a market out there
Regards, Ralph.
Re:Serialnumbers (Score:1)
If real, how do you deal with... (Score:2)
- If you just take a fingerprint of a small snippet of music, a few seconds in length, the fingerprint is going to be different for different parts of some songs. There are songs that have parts that sound very different than other parts.
- Sampling: some songs are known to contain snippets from other songs. Won't this confuse the algorithm? This is both the same as and the opposite of my first point -- some songs can have drastically different sound in places, and some parts of some songs may sound the same as some parts of other songs.
It seems to me you'd really need to process the whole song into little fingerprints that you jam together to get the fingerprint for the song, and then the whole suggested ability of using fingerprints to identify the beginnings and endings of songs in a stream goes out the window. As far as my point 1 above, there are songs that confuse my ear enough to make me think the song has ended and a new one has begun, or have parts that don't even sound like part of the same song, so I think any system that attempts to use these methods to distinguish songs in a stream is going to be prone to failure.However, as far as fingerprinting entire songs, this sounds like a very promising idea. As other slashdotters put it, it's really melody that you're cataloging with this system, or basically making a software equivalent of an "ear for music".
Old quiz shows (Score:1)
I'll name that tune in seven...
Re:Already being done (Score:1)
Re:ouch!? (Score:1)
I agree this could be cool though I have not seen many un-tagged MP3 files.
*blink* *boggle*
Huh? Man, please tell me where you're getting all these tagged MP3 files from! The vast majority of the MP3 files I've found on Napster [napster.com]/OpenNap [sourceforge.net]/mp3.com [mp3.com] are untagged -- and of the rest, a significant number don't even have the "sync" (whatever that is) that mp3info wants, so I can't even add the tags myself!
Re:Stoping mp3's (Score:1)
Re:Radio stations obsolete. (Score:2)
HAPPY FREAKIN' THOUGHT
Hey, there would be nothing stopping me from putting _my_ music's patterns on such a database! There would be no legitimate argument to _prevent_ me doing it and every reason to do so (same for the majors- they'd put up everything they could). Then, anybody no matter where they are could get information on where to get my music, even if they only heard a snippet and went 'That was neat, what's it from?'
VERY cool. Currently, without this, it's a lot easier for random music listeners to identify stuff that is pushed by the major labels. Add this ability to effectively free-associate and still get results and music-recognition becomes effectively random access, reducing the importance of the mainstream industry. (Something I would _love_ to see...)
As a final note, imagine humming or singing into a mike, making a snippet of that, 'fingerprinting' it and then sending it out as a search! On the one hand you could make horrible noises just to see what music out there contains horrible noises. But it goes a hell of a lot deeper than that- for instance, there's a song, "Green-Eyed Lady" that I used to have (was hell to find, too). I never remember the band's name, they were a one hit wonder, but I can still remember the neat spooky feel of the tune- and, more relevantly, I remember that at one point the lyric is 'green-eyed lady, windswept lady', and 'windswept' is articulated with unusual clearness. I have to wonder- if I made a little recording of me trying to sing 'windswept' with the intonation and articulation I remember- would it, on some level, match the original? Would it return me the information on the song itself?
The harder you look at this idea, the more it starts to look like the best sort of science fiction fantasising. Hum the refrain of the tune you can't remember to the computer and it looks through its databanks and (depending on how well you hum!) it tells you what the tune was, better than most humans ever could. This alone would make the idea a killer idea- the added decentralisation that it brings (I can submit all my music to the database and anyone can search for it- just as I can upload a web page and anyone (mostly) can connect to it) makes it even more exciting.
_Good_ _job_ :)
Re:This is for real, friends (Score:1)
Nobody has argued that britney spears mp3s are NOT the same tune as the original CDs because it's stupidly obvious that they're effectively the same tune.
Stupidly obvious to a HUMAN listener. And there, my friend, you have your answer. The RIAA will be able to identify songs in bulk automation.
Hamish
Its possible, Kinda (Score:1)
Remixes- some thoughts on difference (Score:2)
This naturally leads me to wonder what differences would end up matching, and what would cause a failure to match. I think it's pretty safe to say that reducing or increasing the volume of an instrument slightly would not lose the match- the basic shape of the waveform would be the same, only the proportions would be slightly different.
MOVING an instrument, say from right to left in the stereo image, would probably obliterate the match. Both channels would be significantly different. However, a minor shift in the middle of the stereo image would _not_ lose the match.
Finally, if I had doubled instruments (for instance, I can refer you to mp3.com/chrisj [mp3.com] for examples- "B17 Flying Fortress" has doubled basses, and "DeHavilland Mosquito" has doubled acoustic guitars) panned hard left and hard right, I could effectively obliterate a match while leaving the music 'unaltered' for a listener (sort of). This is because on the tracks I mention (and on many other tracks that exist) this doubling technique is used to thicken the mix by playing two takes of the same part, as identically as humanly possible. Musically, there's no particular reason one track should be on one side and not the other. If you swapped them, the musical effect would be basically nil, barring minor glitches that would be registered as coming from the other side now. But when you play acoustic or electric instruments the waveforms are not as predictable as synths- so for the purposes of the fingerprinting, the original track and the track with doubled instruments reversed would be _hugely_ different, even though to the listener they would be musically alike.
Re:This is for real, friends (Score:2)
Just throwing ideas around...
On a similar note, how badly _can_ you manipulate the sound before the fingerprint gets whacked?
Another useless suggestion: could this fingerprint be somehow rendered into a useful visualization for a song? Presently there's the spectrum analyzer and the scope, but if the fingerprint incorporates other elements (I'm not that experienced in audio, so I don't really know what's left...), could you display those? That would be cool -- and, if done correctly, informative.
Re:Radio stations obsolete. (Score:1)
That's what search engines are for. Just plug "green-eyed lady, windswept lady" into Google and you get the lyrics to the song which informs you it is by Sugarloaf and on the CD, Have A Nice Decade: disc 1. You then plug this info back into a search engine or Gnutella and find the tracks. Sometimes, when I'm bored, I amuse myself with this method by trying to start a download of a song I hear on the radio, not knowing the title or artist, before it finishes. Ok, so it's not that exciting.
It's invincible! (Score:4)
...sung at a karaoke event, covered, remixed, hummed by any being with vocal chords, played on a bagpipe, and so on.
--
this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.
Re:Fingerprint can be obscured in seconds (Score:1)
Stoping mp3's (Score:2)
same fingerprint (Score:1)
Already being done (Score:1)
A public algorithm can be easily sidestepped (Score:1)
Some of the uses you suggest would work just fine, as long as no one has the incentive to modify the file so it still sounds fine but has a different fingerprint.
Keeping it a "secret" and selling it to the clueless music industry for "watermark-like" purposes might make some money and work for a little while.
But as soon as people know how the algorithm works it is clear that someone will come up with a way to subtly change the file so your particular scheme is not a reliable fingerprint. I.e. the modified file will have a different fingerprint but it will still sound good enough to folks that the music industry will want to cry foul about the technique. And people will figure out how the algorithm works whether you want them to or not. That is just the way the world of security works.
--Neal
Re:Darn... (Score:1)
--
in reference to Napster's appeal? (Score:1)
Voice Recognition Enhancements (Score:1)
Commercial Applications (Pest Control):
Personal Applications (Solicitor Control):
"He who has all the answers has stoped asking questions."
Serialnumbers (Score:2)
You buy a CD at your local recordstore or via the Web and pay with your creditcard. The CD itself has a unique serialnumber which is also watermarked into every track on the CD itself.
The recordcompanies now know who you are and which CD you bought.
Now, you lend (or even give it as a present) to a friend of yours, who rips a track, encodes it to MP3 and puts the file on gnutella.
Some weeks later, you'll receive a letter from the RIAA and though you don't have the CD anymore this will make it even harder for you to prove your innocence.
I don't want that.
RIAA (Score:1)
And I'm not sure we'd even have much room to complain about it, at least not from a legal standpoint...
If they only complained about the distribution (including publicly posting them), then we couldn't yell and scream about "fair use!"
My God It's Full Of ADs (Score:2)
Fascinating. Now you can embed stupid banner ads directly into the audio content of an mp3. This is both cool and scary.
The only problem with this embedded content is that it would have to be enabled in every different mp3 player in existence. Do I want my XMMS enabled with tuneprint so I can read lyrics? What if the cost of those lyrics is that I have to look at advertising text interspersed between the song lyrics ("Don't Fear The Reaper / Coke is It! / Come on now").
No thanks, I think I'll take my music without ads, and just hum along.
--Jim
Re:Stoping mp3's (Score:1)
The u2 thing? dont think it was settled in court. they made a lot of noise about it, but its still banned (although downloadable at www.negativland.com). I think that it was 2-live crew who won their case. this could have been used to get negland off, but it came too late. the negland thing was complicated by it being both a rich label (island) and a rich celeb (kasey casem) who were against them, and negland arent rich.
But but... (Score:2)
Biff! Kazamm!
ummm, mpaa = (Score:1)
I want the Home Version, Alex! (Score:1)
Re:in reference to Napster's appeal? (Score:2)
To allow this, Napster (or any other) will have to download the MP3 and compute the fingerprint. Downloading all MP3s which are exchanged via Napster will need a huge bandwidth update.
Moreover, I think that computing a fingerprint which doesn't change with compression/resampling can take many time (5 seconds on a Pentium III class ?). They will need a super computer to compute each MP3 fingerprints.
The last solution is to force user to compute fingerprints and to transmit them. But, with an open source project, a user can transmit a false finger print. And even if there were a way to force user to transmit a true finger print, most users will go to another system like GNUtella where there is no central point.
Well, I think that this kind of technology could help web hosters to find illegal MP3 (but do they want to ?). But what I would like to see is a new CDDB system which doesn't rely on some mystic parameters on the CD (which aren't very reliable) and which works with MP3.
Vaguely clever - yet not (Score:2)
Technically to me it seems more like a message-digest operation or checksum. Using the word fingerprint suggests that no two files have the same fingerprint, which would be useful in piracy prevention.
In a perfect world where chocolate has negative calories, we'd digital music downloads where fingerprints were added to downloaded files to identify the user that paid for them. That way they wouldn't want to distribute them since there was a fingerprint that could trace to them.
Unfortunately all the theories about adding a fingerprint which can withstand recompression are pretty unfounded. I've written simple examples of this that add fingerprints to bmp and wav files by manipulating small details that are indetectable to the human eye/ear. Ironically these are the very details that systems like jpeg and mp3 oblitterate.
This system however does none of that and isn't that much different from the checksum that audiocatalyst puts at the end of a comments field.
Also the algorithm to calculate it seems like it must be very complex, and I really dread to imagine how long it would take to search through a several thousand file mp3 archive for a certain song.
Darn... (Score:1)
Artists: You can use it to stop people from putting their name on your band's mp3's and distributing them as their own, or you can use it to embed lyrics, links to your homepage, and stupid banner ads in mp3's.
Darn, now everyone will know that it really wasn't me who wrote "Stairway to Heaven"...
Really though, the last thing I need a banner ad in is an MP3, I get enough of those everywhere elseRe:in reference to Napster's appeal? (Score:1)
Sceptical - Remember watermarks on images? (Score:2)
I'm no expert regarding this, but I'm pretty sure there are similar transormations on audio files nobody can hear, but which will destroy the fingerprint.
Re:It's invincible! (Score:1)
Re:in reference to Napster's appeal? (Score:1)
First, SDMI is getting nowhere fast. They can't even agree on definitions for specifications for technology, so SDMI likely won't see any reality. (Part of this has to do with the fact that many of the members play both sides of the street - like Sony, player maker _and_ a music company.)
Second, there _can't_ be any technology that both survives decoding without significant degradation of signal _and_ is retrievable from ripped files. By definition, the digital "watermark" _has_ to be stripped by playing - otherwise it will have to distort the audio/video output. Yeah, it can be done, but who would buy crippled CDs or DVDs? Better technology will increasingly favor freedom, not continued indentured servitude of artists and their consumers to obsolete, bloodsucking media conglomerate pimps, despite their @%*#$ lawyers!
Sony was off my vendor list last year, because they don't provide any PCMCIA Socket Drivers for anything but Windows (no Linux, no OS/2, just MS) but this seals it: I'll never pay Sony another dime for anything. Same goes for the rest of the MPAA and RIAA. Free movies and music, forever... or, at least, until they back down and get real.
Re:Sceptical - Remember watermarks on images? (Score:1)
A cryptographic hash takes an exact set of bits to result in the hash, a very exclusive operation. It's excluding all of the wrong values. If any of the bits in the configuration are slightly off, then there's a very high likelyhood that the hash will be completely different.
I believe common sense will tell you it is easier to do that than to loosely define a large set of bits that will result in the same hash. And furthermore, the boundary for the bit bag is defined by human intuition (psychoacustics) and empirical research (trial and error).
Granted, lots of hashes are created by people tinkering with an algorithm, but there are excruciatingly detailed and highly refined tests that'll tell how good the algorithm is. The development of the algorithms and tests are based on information theory and statistics.
What are the tests for the audio fingerprinting based on? The answer appears to be our grossly underdeveloped understanding about how the human mind processes sound all the way through to making comparisons between different samples of music. I seriously doubt that something hinging on human intuition and interpretation as part of the algorithm can overcome the fact we don't understand how people's mind work to any acceptable degree.
I spent some time thinking about a way to fingerprint music, and it is a very hard problem to come up with something that captures the essense of our perception of music. Simply doing that is a huge accomplishment. It involves distilling down human methodology for sound recognition, something that is based on a massivly parralel biochemical neural network, or at least something we can only crudely model as a neural network, into a mathematical formula that can be implemented efficiently on a processor.
It is much more likely this won't work because there's a fundamental difference in the platform these two tasks are done on: subjective analysis by a person of some music as to what is and is not the same and some convoluted algorithm attempting to approximate that process on a von-neuman style computer. I won't hold my breath, no matter how cool the idea is. And it is very cool.
They would probably have better luck building a neural network and training it against a large set of people to attempt to capture their collective equality operation
I doubt they will reach their goal, but if they can come up with an algorithm that reasonably sorts music the way people do and to satisfactorally compare music, it will still be very powerful. I personally would love to see such technology be successful.
The ability to emulate how people discern music and to detect differences between samples is tremendous. If nothing else I can finally catalog my music intelligently and to seek new music that will be something I very likely will dig.
Imagine listening to a song that really scratches an itch, taking the fingerprint of that song, even if it is from the radio and getting songs that scratch the itch the same way from a database. How cool would that be?
Not only that, but we'd need that sort of technology in order to find musicians and bands (there is a distinction) that we like if there isn't a huge mega-media-greedy conglomerate driving the mindshare and play time. Combine that with reputation certificates and something like SPKI [ietf.org] and you've got a very successful way to implement the Street Performer's Protocol [counterpane.com] (see the recent /. story [slashdot.org])
A reputation certificate is similar in concept to what eBay does with its sellers in capturing the history of the person to create a mark of how reputable that person or entity is, but it goes one step further and cryptographically binds that information to to an identity. See the SPKI document above for detailed information.
This is stuff that needs to be worked on and I salute tuneprint for working towards that goal.
KNOW YOUR ACRONYMS (Score:1)
RIAA = recording industry ASSociation of america
Flawed (Score:1)
Of course, there will always be programs to strip such fingerprints.
-------
CAIMLAS
Re:Already being done (Score:1)
and
That's true. The explanation does change a lot. Ok, a lot of us have been thinking slashdot has become something of a joke, lately. But goddam, is it really necessary for Hemos - Hemos! - to drive the point home?
Sheesh. There is absolutely nothing on that site that suggests anything other than a hoax.
Re:Flawed (Score:1)
A watermark is data embedded in the song itself with the idea that it is hard to remove the watermark from the song without destroying the song.
Re: duh (Score:1)
I think its kinda funny, actually. It shows you which posters have a clue and which ones are just trying to sound informed.
Re:Flawed (Score:1)
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
doesn't change if compressed? (Score:1)
if the audio sounds different to us (humans) it will HAVE to 'sound' different to computers as well.
yes, we humans can recognize that a compressed (analog) version of a song and the uncompressed version are esentially the same.
but a computer who's just doing "math stuffs" to the bit patterns cannot hope to compare 'similarity' the way we do.
this whole premise is a joke. and not a very creative joke, either.
--
Not quite perfect (Score:1)
It'll change when I extract it to WAV and inspect the entire file for superfluous header data!!!
Re:in reference to Napster's appeal? (Score:1)
Old technology (Score:2)
There are lots of interesting things going on right now in the internet music realm. Check out http://www.mongomusic.com, check out the 'sounds like' feature. Something other then collarabitive filtering! Woohoo! And it works!
...
. ""The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and
. intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb."
Radio stations obsolete. (Score:2)
Re:If real, how do you deal with... (Score:2)
To put a song into the database, you break the song into itty bitty pieces, fingerprint each piece, and put each little fingerprint -- labeled with the track it came from and the offset into the track -- into the database. So what you're getting back from the server is a series of messages like "I think you're at offset foo into track bar." The server will be wrong sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time, because of samples that we haven't correctly dealt with, silence, the inherent loopiness of music, distortions that tuneprint isn't sufficiently robust to, gnomes, etc, but only for the correct matching track will the "offset foo, offset foo+n, offset foo+2n" series make sense.
Anyway, so you can identify song boundaries either by the length of the track in the database based on your current offset, or by just waiting until the track names you're getting from fingerprinting the little bits change (and you pick up the "offset foo, offset foo+n, ..." pattern again.)
Re:Serialnumbers (Score:2)
I didn't say it was impossible, just impractical.
--Jim
[OT] Re:Copying Vinyl is NOOOO problem (Score:1)
I dunno. . . (Score:1)
<!-- Bypass record companies to pay artists directly -->
maybe they have an ulterior motive! :o)
--
A handy tool but hardly the end of Napster (Score:1)
What if this technology is built into sound cards? (Score:1)
Re:cached fingerprints via cryptographic hashes (Score:1)
Re:Copying Vinyl is NOOOO problem (Score:2)
I did not dd from
However, there are any number of small X utilities that will allow one to capture audio from the microphone or line-in and save in some format (which, if not
Re:Serialnumbers (Score:2)
This would mean that every CD is unique -- not just in some data track that can be tacked onto the end of the CD postmaster, but across the entire audio content of the CD. In other words you couldn't stamp every CD from the same master, you'd have to uniquely burn each copy. Doesn't sound economically feasible (thank goodness).
--Jim
Re:Serialnumbers (Score:2)
Are you talking about a single serial number tagged onto the end of the mastered data, or are you talking about actually changing data that has been stamped by the master?
To add serialization data that's intertwined with the audio content (no -- not intertwined -- actually contained within) would mean having to tweak lots of data distributed all across the audio content of the CD. Could your technique do this?
--Jim
Re:Vaguely clever - yet not (Score:2)
Fingerprint vs. Watermark (Score:2)
This technology is for generating fingerprints. i.e. it doesn't embed anything within the file. So it can't be used for tracking who ripped what CD.
They use something very similar to this at least here in the UK to generate radio airplay data. An automated system is fed the output of every monitored radio station, and recognises what songs are played by each.
Re:Get a clue (Score:3)
- The fingerprint shouldn't change even if the music is made louder or softer, re-equalized slightly, passed through a mp3 encoder, speeded up or slowed down a little, and so on. Anything that doesn't change way the music sounds shouldn't change the fingerprint, and it should be impossible for even a smart, well-funded human being to make the fingerprint change without distorting the music.
(emphasis mine)That sounds pretty reasonable and possible to me.
Not That Far-Fetched (Score:3)
So the question then becomes how you "summarize" raw audio data so that 10 different sources/ decodings of the same piece of audio result in the same summary information.
One pretty obvious thing to do is to select frequencies, set a threshold value (relative to the average amplitudes in the audio data for the frequencies you are analyzing) for "peak" amplitude at those frequencies, and measure time deltas between peaks. You can synchronize different audio samples to a recognizable pattern of peaks to get time synch, and you can measure time in quarter-second chunks to be "fuzzy".
The raw data that you digest would then just be a series of peak-to-peak time deltas for each frequency, which should be consistant between recordings (even if you tack dummy data to the beginning and end of the file --- the latter problem being solved by only accounting for a fixed amount of time in each audio file). Think of it as summarizing/fingerprinting the audio data based on the images displayed in your MP3 player's spectrum analyzer.
I'm not sure if what I've described is practical; it's the first thing I came up with when I was presented with the same problem awhile ago. But it's evidence, I hope, to an important fact:
Anything your ears can do, a computer can do better.
Not talking about adding fingerprints/watermarks.. (Score:3)
The problem of course, is that all pop music would have the same signature, since it pretty much sounds all the same anyway...
The signatures are not added as metadata to the songs, though I guess they could be. They are kept in a separate database that is near the analyzing portion of the solution where the results can be queried.
This is an interesting idea. I proposed something pretty similar to my co-workers a few months back when we were looking for a means of uniquely identifying recorded music, but I only received funny looks. Damn me and my laziness!
I think it may be pretty difficult to get this solution working well, considering that songs can contain samples/riffs from other songs and many other factors, etc. I think the minimum length of the analyzation sample would have to be fairly long, relative to the size of the song in order to get an accurate signature.
Get a clue (Score:2)
And after reading their homepage, there can not be any doubt left. The domain is also registered just 3 weeks ago [networksolutions.com]
It is funny though...
Ancient music fingerprinting technique (Score:2)