Friday, April 27, 2007

Audiobaba.com - An Acoustic Similarity Search Engine

Audiobaba is a new kind of music search engine. You type in a song you like, and they give you a list of similar songs by other artists. You can listen to the sample of those songs, and if you like them, you can purchase them at Amazon or iTunes. The selection of songs they return is based on the acoustic structure of the selected. If what they returned doesn't sound similar to you, you can give it the thumbs down, helping their system to more closely match songs to each other that are more relevant. If you like a song in particular, you can add it to your bookmarks, or favorites. It's an interesting new way to find new music. They also offer their API to developers, sharing their new search technology. In their own words: "Audiobaba is a next-generation music search and recommendation engine. We realize that unless you know the name of the song you want, searching for music has so far been a pretty pathetic undertaking. Because there really is no better way to describe a song than "da da dee da da da", rather than using text to search for music, Audiobaba searches for music by fingerprinting the acoustic and impossible to articulate qualities of every song in its database and searches through them acoustically. We then further refine and personalize results as we receive feedback from our valued users."