Basically, I have a lot of audio files representing the same song. However, some of them are worse quality than the original, and some are edited to where they do not match the original song anymore. What I’d like to do is programmatically compare these audio files to the original and see which ones match up with that song, regardless of quality. A direct comparison would obviously not work because the quality of the files varies.
I believe this could be done by analyzing the structure of the songs and comparing to the original, but I know nothing about audio engineering so that doesn’t help me much. All the songs are of the same format (MP3). Also, I’m using Python, so if there are bindings for it, that would be fantastic; if not, something for the JVM or even a native library would be fine as well, as long as it runs on Linux and I can figure out how to use it.
Copying from that answer:
The exact same question that people at the old AudioScrobbler and currently at MusicBrainz have worked on since long ago. For the time being, the Python project that can aid in your quest, is Picard, which will tag audio files (not only MPEG 1 Layer 3 files) with a GUID (actually, several of them), and from then on, matching the tags is quite simple.
If you prefer to do it as a project of your own, libofa might be of help. The documentation for the Python wrapper perhaps will help you the most.