An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.

Practical uses of acoustic fingerprinting include identifying songs, records, melodies, tunes, or advertisements; radio broadcast and peer to peer network monitoring; sound effect library management; video file identification; and much more.

Attributes

A robust acoustic fingerprint algorithm must take into account the perceptual characteristics of the audio. If two files sound alike to the human ear, their acoustic fingerprints should be equal or very similar, even if their binary representations are quite different. (Therefore, acoustic fingerprints are not really fingerprints in the strict sense of the term --- which must be sensitive to any small changes in the data.)

Most Audio compression techniques (MP3, WMA, Vorbis, etc.) will make radical changes to the binary encoding of an audio file without affecting the way it sounds. A robust acoustic fingerprint will allow a recording to be identified after it has gone through such compression, even if the audio quality has been reduced significantly. For use in radio broadcast monitoring, acoustic fingerprints should also be insensitive to analog transmission artifacts.

On the other hand, a good acoustic fingerprint algorithm must be able to identify a particular master recording among all the productions of an artist or group. For use as evidence in a court of law, an acoustic fingerprint method must be forensic in its accuracy.

Implementations

Acoustic fingerprinting efforts include:

• All Media Guide's LASSO is a commercial service that uses acoustic fingerprinting, and other techniques, to recognize music. (US Patent 7,277,766)
• AudioID is a commercial technology for automatically identifying audio material using acoustic fingerprints. It was developed by the German Fraunhofer Institute.
• Foosic is a free and open content project which uses its own free fingerprinting technology named libFooID.
• Gracenote's MusicID is a commercial product that uses acoustic fingerprinting along with other methods to identify music.
  • Winamp version 5.5 uses Gracenote to power automatic playlist generation with "Nullsoft Playlist Generator" plugin that comes with the software.
• Last.fm have begun their own method of acoustic fingerprinting via the Fingerprinter application.^[1]
• MusicBrainz, a free and open content project for a music database that uses MusicIP's Open Fingerprint Architecture for fingerprinting and the MusicDNS service for identifying audio files.
• Shazam, an acoustic fingerprint-based service allows for songs to be identified via cell phone.

References

External links

• AudioFingerprint at MusicBrainz's wiki
• A Review of Algorithms for Audio Fingerprinting (P. Cano et al. In International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, US Virgin Islands, December 2002)

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