I am looking for software that can create a list of all songs in a 1 hour radio show that is recorded as a single MP3. Can MusicBrainz do that, if not, do you know of software that can? I have searched this forum and the internet in general and I haven’t found an answer yet. Thanks!
No. Musicbrainz, or more specifically AcoustID, is aimed at recognising a track from a CD converted to MP3\FLAC. It takes a single track and mashes it into a fingerprint \ ID number. It is more about naming exact versions.
To work on the radio show you would need to slice the show into multiple tracks, and then hope to get the same exact start to the track as was on the CD. Unlikely if a DJ has been talking over it. (And it will take a lot of faff anyway).
There are better tools out there that can more “listen” to what you are listening to and do ID on the fly from a snippet.
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Ivan thanks for the reply, much appreciated. I think that I will need to manually enter the tracks that are in a radio show MP3. Maybe this is an opportunity for some software to be created to do this!
If you have a smartphone, you can listen to your MP3, and each time you hear a new song, you try Shazam on it.
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As others have said, this is NOT something that Picard is designed for or capable of doing.
But if I was going to try to write a program to do this (assuming that it will run on a desktop computer of some form and not a web server or a mobile phone), I would go about it as follows:
a. Think about the UI and what other functionality you might want (if not now, then in the future). If you simply want a command line tool where you give it the MP3 filename and it spits out a list of songs to the console / a text file, then it is probably easier to write this yourself. If you (will ever) want to e.g. use the list of songs to listen, save individual song MP3s etc. and will likely want a GUI, then perhaps you should try to find some desktop software that provides basic sound file functionality (like splitting into sub-files) and allows you to write plugins (Audacity??).
b. Look for some sound processing libraries / online services that would help you build the functionality you need. You need a library which can examine the MP3 and identify where songs start / end and where there is chat or advertisements between them - AcoustID uses these sorts of libraries and I believe there is a reference to them on the AcoustID web site. Then you will need to clip a sample from the middle of each song and find a web service that you can submit the sample to and which will identify the song.
Then it is a simple matter of sticking it all together (which is, of course, the hard part).
Maybe interesting: I did test this a bit quite a while back with the Shortwave radio player for Linux. It has the nice func5ion of saving just played songs as files. That means you already get individual files split by songs.
Out of interest I ran AcoustID scanning over them. As expected the results where mixed. Most had fingerprints that did not fit, which was often not surprising as often the beginnings included talking, end of advertisement or part of the previous song. On the other hand I was positively surprised that I got quite a few hits. So it all depends on the proper cutting and whether there is other audio included.
But for the use of identifying arbitrary song snippets AcoustID is just not the right tool as it was not designed to do this.
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Also I’ve found that SoundHound brings results of more obscure stuff that Shazam doesn’t know yet.
Mixcloud can detect songs from continuous mixes (if the music is for sale in their partners connected stores, I think) but it sometimes makes mistakes, nevertheless I’d recommend the OP uploading the shows there and let it generate a tracklist. I’m guessing the gaps get filled in when individual tracks come to be released if not straight away.
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“Add our famous SoundHound music identification technology to any product. SoundHound allows users to discover any song by listening to the music nearby or humming the tune. In search mode, SoundHound lets music enthusiasts find music by title, author, album name, or keywords from the song.”
You almost certainly need to pay to use the API for real, but this would be an interesting Picard plugin to complement AcoustBrainz as a way of identifying tracks.
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