How Does Windows Media Player Do This?

[Clunk]

I recorded a load of vinyl via soundforge, and I just loaded one up in WMP and WMP retrieved the correct song info, artist, album etc.

It isnt even saved as the name of the track

How did it do it?

Is there a room full of musical trainspotters at microsoft that play name that tune?

[Whiternoise]

Waveforms?

It's probably the fastest way

(I'm guessing here, but i think that's how it works - so you'd be kind of right, just a room full of servers that play at spectral analysis )

[finlay666]

ex-dj chickens with earphones

[Kezzer]

Yeh, that's how modern ones do it, and this is how the music DNA systems work too. It analyses the waveform and matches it against a music database to find the correct track. Clever stuff!

[Clunk]

But, the waveform cant be the same as anything else, as I recorded it from vinyl, and it went through an EQ, and then I manually Eq'ed it, so it wont look much like one from a cd....weird!

[unreal]

Either way that's pretty impressive D:

[Whiternoise]

But in effect you're just mucking around with amplitudes and timbre surely? You're not really affecting the base frequencies and i imagine there's software powerful enough to discern a few changes - look at voice recognition as an example of this

[Clunk]

Well, what about clicks and crackles, they would affect it wouldnt they? I'm only guessing, but if it did get it right by doing that, then I'm very impressed

[Lucio]

I'd be surprised if the pops and crackles would affect it. After all you're talking about a few seconds of noise over the whole song. Not to mention, it probably filters out certain frequencies when it does it analysis and focuses on a small part (e.g. 10,000 to 12,000Hz) and then say the length to decide which song is which.

[Funkstar]

I'm sure i've read about audio fingerprinting that is pretty good at guessing tracks. I think MusicBrainz can do this and works well.

clicks and pops wouldn't effect this as it isn't looking for an exact match.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_fingerprinting
might be worth a read

[Clunk]

But really, does WMP have audio fingerprinting? Is it meant to have that as a feature? Maybe thats what takes up one of the cores whwn playing

[yamangman]

You sure the meta info wasn't filled with say, track name or album information?

[Clunk]

You sure the meta info wasn't filled with say, track name or album information?

Yep, positive, it is still blank.

[MadduckUK]

well theres that service where the chavvy clueless clubgoers can dial a number and then let it hear a bit of the song thats playing and it will tell them what its called (probably a dick von partysausage reeeeemix of BIG Phat ******'s "spastic dance")

[Funkstar]

But really, does WMP have audio fingerprinting? Is it meant to have that as a feature? Maybe thats what takes up one of the cores whwn playing

No idea. Could you have installed something that would add it as a plugin?

I don't like or use WMP unless i'm forced to. MediaPlayer Classic is my fave

[Zak33]

ex-dj chickens with earphones

for the WIN! I thank you