Question

I was thinking about building a website for song recognition (something similar to midomi.com but much more simple):

User uploads a MP3 or posts a link to a Youtube video and the website will tell him (for free) the name of the track, artist and other info – basically all the stuff that should be in the MP3’s ID3 tag.

The biggest problem is how should I recognize the song? I don’t plan writing the algorithm myself (I can’t spend that much time on something I want to offer for free :-)).

I know that e.g. Winamp uses the Gracenote database http://www.gracenote.com/ for MP3 identification.
Can you do the same using PHP – by calling some their remote method that searches the database for a match with the provided file or its “footprint”?

Or can you suggest any other databases or tools?

I found someone used Gracenote in PHP here: http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php?topic=240930.0
But that’s basically just editing the texts in the tags. What about song recognition?

Answer 1

• This article should get you started with the comparison of audio samples:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint

• MusicBrainz offers a webservice you can query for track information:
  http://musicbrainz.org/doc/XMLWebService

  • They also offer information on audio fingerprinting:
    http://musicbrainz.org/doc/AudioFingerprint