Music Recognition Service Roundup

by
Inf

I just saw the stats of Geekscribes and the article about the music recognition software Tunatic is leading in the number of views. Seeing how people are interested in such services, I decided to dedicate a post about other services of the same type that do work from a computer or are online services. Let’s start:

Update (05.08.10): Added Audiggle (#5)

1. Tunatic

I have already talked at length on this software now. Download and install it, plug in a microphone, record a piece of your unknown track via Tunatic and it’ll probably give you the track name and artist if they are in the database. The problem with Tunatic is that development seems to have stopped, as it can be seen from this line on Tunalyzer’s page: “NB: Tunalyzer should be available for the Windows platform in early 2007.”. Tunalyzer allows you to analyze your own known songs, and have them added to the Tunatic database.

It works for most songs I tested it on, but since development seems to have stopped, I don’t have much hope for the project getting new features.

Read the post about Tunatic on Geekscribes

2. Midomi

This one is a new service I’ve just discovered, but which I don’t use as it was meant to. Basically, it’s an online service where you go, and hum/sing some track you don’t know the details of. Maybe it’s a tune stuck in your head somewhere and you’d like the name. There’s a bar near the top part. So you click on it, hum the song in your microphone and it’ll almost certainly give you the track’s details. It worked for all tracks I tested, even some lesser-known tracks which surprised me. It’s also very fast in its identification.

Read the post about Midomi on Geekscribes

3. Audiotag

This service takes a different approach from the above two. Instead of recording a tune, you need to upload the track or some part of it to the service. You can use a variety of tools to do cut an MP3 track, for example, Mp3DirectCut which is free. After uploading the piece, which should be around 10-15 seconds minimum, it’ll give you the details you want.

I have not tested the service a lot since I would need to do a lot of cutting tracks. But I tested with two tracks, and both were recognized. One was fairly known, the other less-known with almost no lyrics.

Also, there are those facts mentioned in the footer: “recognized queries: 83453; DB size: 1327721 tracks, 96479 albums; last DB update: 4 days ago; added 23636 tracks, 1833 albums“, so I believe Audiotag is a reliable service.

Audiotag is good for people who do not have microphones, but the compromise is that you must have access to the digital track itself to be able to upload it. It doesn’t work for tunes you’ve heard on the radio or stuck in your mind, but it is good to identify that nice tune you downloaded off some site named “Track-01”. 🙂

4. Picard Tagger via Musicbrainz

Picard is not an identifier per-se. It’s a tagger. You give it access to your unknown tracks locally, and it will tag them (if possible) using data from the audio fingerprint database of  Musicbrainz.

When tested, Picard was able to identify some tracks which didn’t have their tags. However, its use is slightly more complex than the 3 above services. The strength of Picard is that it can do recognition on its own without needing to record or upload things. It’s also cross-platform, providing Windows, OSX and Linux support.

You can download Picard here, and check out the docs of Musicbrainz that teaches you how to use it.

5. Audiggle

That one is relatively new to me. The website is clean and simple, so I hope the program is as nice. I immediately went and put it to test. I immediately noticed the .NET requirement. So much for portability. If you need that, Midomi’s for you. But let’s see Audiggle’s worth. Installation was a breeze. First thing, I had to set my Microphone. Problem is I have two Line-Ins for microphone, both listed as “Microphone” so I have no idea about which is which. A note about which microphone belongs to which sound-card would be nice.

Next… What? Registration? What the hell? This is an immediate turnoff for me. Why do I need to register to identify a track. Ok, maybe to track all my identified tracks. Lol. Ok let’s go through this pain. Fortunately, registration is quite fast. Okayyy. First try. Login… “Audiggle is down for maintenance.” Nothing on the website indicates this though. Alright, after 5 mins of retries, it’s still failing.

Guess it’s not ready for the lime-light yet. I’ll come back to it later. If you have more success than me, do leave a comment please!

Do you know a similar service, but which is not mentioned here? Please post it in the comments below!

P.s. There are many other recognition services not mentioned in this roundup. This is because most of them either require a mobile phone or mobile device of some kind (Shazam) or they require you to type notes on virtual keyboards (MusicPedia). These are not really intuitive to use in my opinion, so I shared only the most user-friendly and accessible-to-all services.

Internet Filtering Coming To Mauritius Soon?

by
Inf

I have found an interesting article coming from Le Mauricien newspaper of Friday 21st of May. You can see a shot below.

It deals with some measures ICTA (Information Communication Technology Authority) wishes to introduce or see implemented. While some are laudable, such as promotion of ICT as education tools and enhancing performance of communication systems, the last part of the article ticks off my Paranoia Alarm.

The shot of the scary paragraph, with highlighted portions can be seen below.

Well, what do I see? ICTA wants to implement Internet filtering in Mauritius.

I remember Ex-President, Mr. Cassam Uteem’s wish to see some pages of Facebook blocked due to some offensive content. There have also been past instances of Facebook being blocked in Mauritius, for example, due to the usurpation of our PM’s identity to create a profile. These cases may have warranted a blocking of the incriminating pages, but I doubt censorship was the only possible solution.

Now imagine if our local politicians or authorities have the power to block sites at a whim. Tomorrow, Mr. X doesn’t like a parody video of his speech on Youtube, and the site is blocked? No thanks!

Something strikes me as funny in this article: “the idea is not to implement censorship”. Can somebody enlighten me about the difference between “filtering” and “censorship”? I thought that content that was filtered out was censored. Am I wrong?

Giving censorship powers to a Government is too much in my opinion. The Internet should be a free-flow of information, and not to be controlled by anybody. I agree that there are some content that deserve censorship, but I believe it’s best left to its users to know what should be accessed and what should not. Such situations exist in real-life too. There are some places in cities where it is dangerous to go. However, I do not see any barriers erected to prevent people, especially children from going there. So why should this apply to the Internet?

If parents do not want their kids accessing unauthorized contents, well, they can be educated into how to implement filtration software on their machines locally. Or make the government-filtering opt-in. So people who want to see the Internet filtered can install software locally to do the job, with the use of a Government-managed database. Others can continue using the Internet as they see fit, taking their responsibilities if ever they are caught doing nasty stuff.

On a side note, we see the Internet from the social and crowd aspect nowadays. You have social networking, social bookmarking, social music discovery, social-tea-making, social-what-not. Why not social filtering? I have no idea how this would work, but hey, we do democratic voting to elect out leaders, we could do some democratic voting on what we want off the Internet too right?

I leave you to the views and your comments…

Music Identification using Midomi

by
Inf

I once blogged about Tunatic, which is a service you use to identify a song. It’s useful in situations where you have heard something nice on the radio or from some other source, and you wish to know the song’s details, like the artist’s and song’s name.

There are many applications that allow you to do this nowadays, but most are on the iPhone, such as the now-famous Shazam.

However, I don’t have an iPhone but I wanted to use such a service. Initially, I was using Tunatic, but the latter has not been updated in quite a long time now. I think it’s a dead project. I had to find an alternative. An alternative that can be used from a computer.

I came across this new service, Midomi. It functions just like Tunatic in that you just record a piece of a song using your microphone and it will give you the song’s details.

The thing about Midomi is that you are supposed to hum the song, or sing the lyrics. I can’t do any of those well. So I just stuck my microphone near my speaker playing the unknown song to test the service. Guess what, it works!

I kind of not followed the procedures because I didn’t sing or hum myself but the important thing is that it can identify songs with Tunatic’s simplicity.

What seriously amazed me is how many song Midomi is able to identify. I used it on some well known tracks from Ill Nino and  Muse and it successfully passed the test. I then tested it using some lesser-known tracks from the Drum and Bass genre (which does not have singing and is almost un-hummable). It gave me all the correct titles, where I expected it to fail like Tunatic did. Hell, it even identified a track from the Metal Gear Solid 4 OST which I got from Youtube! (Drebin 893)

Overall, Midomi is AMAZING! It even gives you the option to buy the desired track if that’s what you wish. For me, it’s the Tunatic replacement of choice.

The requirements are that you need a microphone and Flash Player. You’ll need to allow Flash to access your microphone and speakers, but this shouldn’t be a problem since it prompts you.

So if you have some song whose name you don’t know, or who performs it, head to Midomi and give it a try. It does not deceive.

On Pause for Exams

by
Inf

PauseIcon

Icon courtesy of Jojo Mendoza: Available here.

Hello readers, this post is here to tell you that the Geekscribes authors are on pause for the duration and reason stated below.


Reason: University End of Year (End of Course) Exams

From: 5th May 2010   —   To: 15th June 2010

Notes: On Pause means that we will not blog very often/if any. We’ll probably be able to answer your comments though, so leave them. 🙂

Updates: Exams going full swing.In a few weeks and at the end, I will have to present my end of year project etc. So you can imagine that I am a bit busy. I will probably return mid of June and by then, I hope I get some new ideas for Geekscribes. There are some things that need to change and tweak here. I hope to be able to blog on a larger variety of topics too. I dunno yet. Let’s wait for mid June.

Oh, and sorry for that Account Suspended error message. Something weird must have happened.

We are sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you for reading GeekScribes. You can still read our Archives if you want to.

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Thank you for reading GeekScribes. See ya and come back soon!

Unplanned Downtime of 22nd March

by
Inf

Greetings readers!

I am very sorry about what happened over the last two days. There has been unplanned downtime on Geekscribes, due to some laziness on my part.

My webhost, Infolad, informed me that my account needed renewing. However, I have been negligent about checking my emails lately, and I missed the notice. Consequently my hosting account was suspended. It took a bit of time to get the account re-activated.

For that I am sorry. I hope this does not occur again in the future.

P.s. Don’t worry. Geekscribes will not simply vanish without notice. If ever you come and see Geekscribes is not there, it’ll probably mean we are having some issues with the site and trying to figure it out.

Welcome, and enjoy your stay with us at Geekscribes.

Thank you for your visit!

PHP Lessons 9: Session and Cookies

by
Guest-GS

Hello there, back with some PHP lessons. It’s been quite a while. Got loads of projects to deal with at work and wasn’t feeling like typing codes at home.

This lesson will deal about session ($_SESSION) and cookies ($_COOKIES)…(This kind of cookie has nothing to do with cookies our grand-mother used to cook for us 😀 )

Continue Reading »

Windows 7: Solutions to can’t sleep problems.

by
Inf

win7-logo

Hello folks. Sorry for lack of recent posts. Been taken up with uni lately. Anyway, I have recently migrated to Windows 7. I have to say Microsoft has done a magnificent job this time, especially when I compare Win7 and Vista. Performance on Win7 is awesome. And there are lots of usability improvements, which makes 7 a very nice software.

However, I was having a problem: I couldn’t manually sleep my computer. If I did it from the Orb/Start menu, the screen would turn off, the PC would shut for like a millisecond, before starting back up, and prompting me for login.

Turns out there are a few things that can cause this error, and they are easy to troubleshoot. Try these steps if you are having the same problem as me.

1) Update your drivers.

This should be pretty obvious. An old driver might be causing an issue. So just update your drivers, specially for your video card and it should correct any problem. If it still doesn’t work, move on.

2) Try to see which requests are keeping the PC on.

Open a Command Prompt. You can do it by typing “cmd” from the Run menu, or simply open the Start Menu, and type “Command Prompt” in the “Search Programs and Files” bar.

Type this command: “powercfg -requests” without quotes. Then press Enter. You will see a list of programs that could be making requests. Windows Media Player is a usual culprit. Just close them, and it should work. If you have “None.” marked, move on.

3) A specific device is keeping the PC from sleeping

Still in the command prompt, type “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed”. You will see a list of devices that can wake up your PC. For me, I got my Network card, Keyboard and Mouse in that list. Turns out it was my mouse that was responsible for waking up the machine.

What to do? Simple: Go to device manager ( Start Menu – Control Panel (View by: Large Icons, top right)  – System – Device Manager (left sidebar) ). Find your device that you think is causing the problem. For me it was the mouse, but I had to try disabling each individually. So, find your mouse in that list, e.g. Mice and other pointing devices, right-click it, choose Properties and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck the box “Allow this device to wake the computer“.

Validate the windows with Ok, close Control Panel, and you should be all ok. Try sleeping your computer now.

That’s it for this small guide. I hope it helps you. Step 3 solved my problem. My computer now sleeps when I want it to sleep. 🙂