I'm going to post a mascotesque post.

Playing with Winamp quite a bit, and I've found a really cool feature... 
Auto-tag. Took some tracks that somebody put together on a CD as a 
"party favor" for my wife's wedding shower a few years ago. A real 
mishmash of music and genres, and no track identification. I previously 
ripped the music from the CD, calling the tracks "Wedding track 1, etc". 
Yesterday I thought I would try the auto-tag feature to see how well it 
worked.

#1. It worked shockingly well, One track was mislabeled, and I'm 
guessing it was more a mislabeling of the CD tracks on the album that 
that song belonged on in the database.

#2. It was very quick.

It uses "fingerprinting" technology to match the song with its entry on 
the database. What I found even more interesting is if I stripped a 
track of its name, tags, and anything other than the audio to identify 
it. It would correctly identify it. Even if that song came from a 
"greatest hits" album (e.g. the same exact song could be found elsewhere 
on a different album)

Obviously there must be some sort of hashing involved ... but how? We're 
talking a file that has been encoded with a lossy algorithm, and while 
the data resembles the original, it is not the original ...

... Anyway, part 2, related...

In winamp is this "Play songs similar to ..." menu item. A little 
research yields a program called MusicIP mixer. Which I'm playing with 
to shuffle my music library. Essentially it groups similar songs 
together. So far the shuffle is surprisingly smooth. It uses acoustic 
fingerprinting as well to do its work. I listen to a fairly broad 
spectrum of genres, Its nice because it doesn't say put a country song 
immediately after say, Rage against the Machine ...

-- 
~Mike

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