How does that work then? I Shazamd a song today and it took all of 1 second to identify it, is it magic?

Clever bit of software, but not all that tricky to do. Basically each song has a unique ‘fingerprint’ that they generate from the songs spectrogram, which is basically is a measure of how often a given frequency appears in the track. They store a compressed copy of millions of these fingerprints and try to match the fingerprint of your sample to one in their database.

There’s a really good explanation here: So You Code: Shazam It gives a brief overview before going a wee bit more in depth about whats happening behind the scenes. Enjoy!

Ignore what he just said…..it is indeed magic.
It’s particularly strong magic when you use it on a packed booming dance floor!!!

Noticed it doesn’t work on even accurate cover versions

The magic bit is when they start using it as a web reference.

i “shazamed” a moby track during the F1 today, despite the wailing of F1 engines that should have confused it! it clearly is indeed magic or alien derived software

Noticed it doesn’t work on even accurate cover versions

It will if the cover version has been recorded and is in the database.