so a funny thing happened on my through a davenet piece. i stumbled upon tuneprint. and it made my head spin:
“Tuneprint is an audio fingerprinting algorithm. It takes the unique ‘fingerprint’ of a sound clip, which can then be compared to a fingerprint database to get more information about the clip, like title and artist, lyrics, URLs, related music, copyright status, or almost anything else. The fingerprint doesn’t change even if the sound is compressed, converted to a different file format, broadcast over the radio, and so on.
Artists: You can use it to stop people from putting their name on your band’s mp3’s and distributing them as their own, or you can use it to embed lyrics, links to your homepage, and stupid banner ads in mp3’s.
Haxxors: You can use it to stop warez kiddies from uploading copyrighted mp3’s to your webserver, or you can use it to build the ultimate mp3 search engine.
Terrorists: You can use it as the foundation of an international fascist copy protection enforcement network, or you can use it to automatically rip, separate, categorize, and save to disk all songs played on all radio stations everywhere!!”