TrackID™ Music Recognition Service on my Sony Ericsson Is Awesome
I recently got GPRS activated on my semi-crappy Dolphin connection and so I decided to check out some of the features in my phone that I’ve never really got to use before.
One of those features is TrackID™ music recognition service. It basically records a small clip of music from a source (could be external or internal such as radio) and sends the clip to their online servers. The clip is then compared against a large database of music. If a match is found, the name, artist and album of the track is returned.
So far, I’ve got a 100% success from radio as well as external sources. I even played an old Hindi song from the 90s, and it got recognised instantly. The flash intro on the official website shows a guy using it to identify a sing that is played by a DJ at a discothèque or a club, but I doubt it would be able to do so with so much noise. But it, however, did pick up a track (and correctly identified it) from my speakers while I was sitting at a distance of 8 feet from them.
Some screens -
It returns the data in plaintext so you can send it to somebody via SMS or save it as a draft.
And if you’re wondering how I managed to grab screens from my Sony Ericsson K530i, I used a neato tool called DisplayReader which I found out via Life Rocks 2.0.
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May 17th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
That is one awesome tool. Try some 80’s punk bands.
May 17th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
TrackID is actually not Sony’s own service, but licensed from Gracenote (that’s the new name of CDDB). Gracenote also provides similar tagging features in Winamp and provides lyrics for Yahoo! Music. Gracenote works similar to MusicBrainz (available in Amarok for instance), by creating an audio fingerprint of a song and matching it to a database – except that unlike MusicBrainz, Gracenote’s database is not user-contributed.
Does Gracenote / TrackID work properly with Hindi songs? I tried in Winamp a few times, and for most Hindi songs it returned crap data.
Motorola phones come bundled with Shazam’s MusicID recognition service. Works similar to TrackID, and once a song has been identified it also offers you to buy the track from Motomusic. In my testing, it worked really well with Hindi songs too – even when I threw old songs at it.
May 17th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Well I tried it with an old 80s Hindi track as well as a track from Ghajini. Both were recognised promptly.
June 12th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
i used track id at a restaurant and then i clicked a save result,but now i cant find my result,how can we save our result?