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Audentify identifies artist and song of YouTube videos

If you are a regular on the video hosting website YouTube, you may have had issues identifying music used in some of the videos.

This is generally not a problem for single music videos, as they are properly tagged more often than not, but it is an issue for many non-music videos that get uploaded to YouTube as no information about the music used in them may be listed in the description or title.

If you have a YouTube account, you may sometimes want to ask the author of the video about it and if you are lucky, may even get an answer that helps you out.

The only other recourse is to use music identification software. Programs like the excellent My Music Recognition or Shazam help you identify music by scanning songs and comparing them against a music footprint database.

Audentify is a new service that has been designed for YouTube exclusively. All that you have to do is paste a YouTube video url into the form on the Audentify website and wait a couple of seconds for the video to get scanned by the service.

audentify

There are two possible outcomes. The first is that no song could be identified, the second that a song was identified. If the second is true, you will be taken to an overview page where the name of the artist and the song name are displayed.

Here you also find embedded a video of that artist and song, a picture of the artist, short biographic information, a link to Last.fm to listen to more songs of the artist, and a buy link.

How good is the service?

Results were mixed. While it did identify some -- rare -- songs like the Leadbelly song on the screenshot above, it failed to identify songs from artists such as Madonna or Falco at the same time.

The service is in beta though and it is likely that is getting better with time as the footprint database expands and covers more songs. I would have expected it to identify songs from world famous artists though.

Good news is, all songs that it did identify were identified correctly which is at least as important as size of the database. Besides that, it would be great if support for other video sites and music files would be added to the service.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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