Local firm uses digital DNA to identify Internet music
Song recognition need in wake of Napster case
By Shari Kaplan
Just when it seems that technology couldn't get any more high-tech, another company comes out with another product that wows the average computer user and makes the Internet geek exclaim, "It's about time!"
One of those companies is Los Gatos' own Audible Magic, founded in 1999, by Los Gatan Vance Ikezoye and Saratogan Jim Schrempp. Its main thrust, according to Ikezoye, is technology with enough smarts to accurately identify songs simply by "listening" to them.
This content-based audio software is called Audible Match--a trademarked name--and is able to detect and produce a distinct "fingerprint" of any given song or audio clip. This comes at a propitious time for Audible Magic, with the now-infamous song-swapping website Napster under major fire by recording artists and record labels for the violation of copyright laws.
Napster's detractors' say there should be no such venue for the unauthorized trading and downloading of songs, but there's a secondary problem, as well. Although several major recording labels have already forced Napster to block their songs from its database, until recently, Napster had some trouble following these court orders.
This is because among the 12 million song artist-title pairs in the database, approximately 3 million contain some type of error or variation in the name of the artist, title or both, according to statistics on the Napster website. Although Napster has chosen Berkeley-based Gracenote to provide it with music recognition technology and help clean up its database, other companies--such as University Avenue's Audible Magic--are making names for themselves with similar solutions.
"People have said that this kind of software that can listen to music and identify it is very magical, and that's where we got our name," Ikezoye says. For that software, Audible Magic teamed up with its Muscle Fish division, which used to be a separate company composed of engineers who did electronic music research and development for Yamaha Music Technologies USA Inc.
Audible Match software produces a "digital fingerprint" by analyzing the sound spectrum of an audio file, MP3 file or streaming audio clip and then using complex algorithms to distinguish the various frequencies.
"We analyze the unique acoustic properties of a song and capture a small amount of digital data," explains Mindy Gillen, Audible Magic's director of marketing. "Although it's a tiny portion of a whole, it's a totally unique trait that IDs the whole song, just like your fingerprint identifies you.
"With it so easy to create digital copies of music, it's very unprotected and very easy for people to make mistakes," she says, citing the Napster's problems.
Some software of this type relies on meta-data tags, ID3 tags or watermarks. These are digital pieces of information--such as song title or artist--embedded in the song files that viewers can't hear, but computers can read. What makes Audible Match different, Gillen says, is that it creates unique fingerprints that can identify the song, or sound clip, across multiple file formats.
Audible Magic is building an ever-expanding database of fingerprints for copyrighted music. Along with offering its services to multimedia search engines and other websites, Audible Magic currently has two other software applications that use Audible Match technology as their foundation.
Playlist Generator is a fully automated application that monitors and identifies the artist and title of any song coming from an Internet radio, standard radio, TV, cable or satellite. It's designed for monitoring associations and content owners to track songs, which can aid them in determining royalties.
Clango is available to the public as a download off the Audible Magic website. When computer users hear a song on an Internet radio station, they can click on the Clango ID button on their computer desktop and capture a digital fingerprint of that song. Clango then sends the snippet over the Internet to Audible Magic's song identification servers, which identify the song and relay the information back to the user. For listeners who really liked what they have heard, Clango can even set them up with purchasing information.
For more information about Audible Magic, call 408.399.6405 or visit www.audiblemagic.com on the Internet.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
