Echoprint: Open acoustic fingerprinting

Posted Jun 30, 2011 19:53 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: Echoprint: Open acoustic fingerprinting by jimparis
Parent article: Echoprint: Open acoustic fingerprinting

No way there are [one billion] songs in the world.

Actually, I suspect there are far more than that! The number that have been recorded and distributed on the Internet may be much smaller though. But even there--there's a lot of music coming out of Japan and India, you know. Not to mention the rest of the world. As for not-recorded--my niece made up at least two songs in the last week alone! :)

It's also going to depend on how you define "song". Is the legendary Jimi Hendrix cover of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower a different song from Bob's original? I suspect most people would say yes, but then what about the version Bob recorded in collaboration with the Grateful Dead? Is that the same as Bob's original? Or is it the same song as the version the Grateful Dead released on their own a couple of years later? Both? Neither? What about the over 1.5 million liberally-licensed live tracks hosted on the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive? (The overwhelming majority of which are from the USA.) What about the guys I regularly see on the streets around here selling privately made CDs of their own group's work (some of which probably does end up on the Internet)?

I suspect your estimates of the current database sizes are accurate, but I'm not so sure about your proposed theoretical limits.