Work performed while at Cantametrix, Inc. (acquired by Sony/Gracenote)
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Cantametrix was a pioneer in music identification and categorization in the early days of
downloadable music files, when metadata attached to MP3s was often incorrect,
inconsistent, or purposefully obfuscated. We developed a pattern recognition system that
identified digital music files directly from the acoustic waveforms without relying on metadata,
based on perceptual features computed with digital signal processing algorithms. The system
correctly identified songs from a million-song database (large at the time!) independently of
codec and encoding quality. The time-to-identification, comprising feature computation
and database lookup, was a fraction of a second.
Gracenote/Sony acquired Cantametrix and incorporated the technology into their
ubiquitous MusicID© platform. The "Cantametrix fingerprint" lives on in popular consumer
products such as Apple iTunes and WinAmp. An article in the Seattle Weekly describes that work.
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