Hi - This is Chris Barton (founder of Shazam). Sony's TrackID was built by licensing (and later buying) a technology invented by Philips. That tech was invented after Shazam. Shazam was the first to create an algorithm that identifies recorded music with background noise in a highly scaled fashion. My co-founder, Avery Wang, invented the algorithm in 2000. Chris (www.chrisjbarton.com)
Hi Chris, it's Cornel Masson . I was at the London office from 2002-2006, then 4 more years working remotely from South Africa.
I worked on all the Java infrastructure around the recognition cluster (the latter being handcrafted C and assembly, optimised for specific Intel hardware).
The thing that Shazam got right was not just the core recognition tech, but the business processes and supporting systems around it. I remember how much work Chris had to do to convince the 4 major mobile networks in the UK to give Shazam the same 2580 dialing code (the middle 4 buttons, top to bottom, on an early 2000s feature phone).
A major part of the business is the constant sourcing and ingestion of the latest music, in all target markets (think Afrikaans pop in South Africa), deals with pluggers and record labels, etc. Initially, the back catalog was ripped from CD by a huge team of people in a warehouse, on custom workstations.
No no no, Tuneprint was well before that. By 2004 we were LONG gone. Shazam didn't show up until I think years later.
And I might be confusing them with another group but I thought, at the time, they were doing some goofy hash of the highest energy Fourier components -- a source of entertainment in our office. ;-)
I think Geoff had the vision and algorithm from the 90s as part of an ISEF project (!?). We had funding in 2001, when we got the real world go-to-your-car-and-get-a-cd and then we identify it ... using the audio signal alone.... demo working.
With a corpus of hundreds of thousands of songs. Positive match in less than 2 seconds.
Sadly, in 2001 there's no market for such whizbang amazing tech.
