If you’ve read last night’s Music Ally Report, you’ll hopefully have seen our music recognition feature, which included a big announcement from US music technology firm The Echo Nest. If not, though, here are the key details. It has unveiled Echoprint, a free and open source music fingerprint and identification service, working with 7digital and Musicbrainz. “Everything from the program to analyze the audio to the server and data to make the match are available for anyone to use, under a permissive open source license, for free,” explains the company in a blog post. In short, any developer can now create their own Shazam or SoundHound app, although The Echo Nest hopes the results of Echoprint won’t just be dozens of clones of those services. It cites potential examples such as social music apps that scan local music collections; music games that can detect a song playing in the room and pull in metadata from other Echonest APIs; a hardware box sitting in between a turntable and a stereo to scrobble vinyl to Last.fm or Facebook; and the ability for a mobile app to recognise what film or TV show is being watched by identifying its soundtrack. Highly disruptive for the established players in the space (Gracenote, as well as Shazam and SoundHound), but potentially huge for developers.
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Tools :: We Are Giant
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