New startup Midomi, a voice-based music search engine with a social network bolted on, launched earlier today. If you have a microphone connected to your computer, just sing or hum a few seconds of any song. In theory, Midomi will return a link to the original song for partial playback or purchase, and will also return results from other users who’ve recorded themselves singing that song.
I’ve been testing this all morning. And I cannot come up with a single match. Not one. I think that my voice is to blame, though, as others testing it seem to have good results. In my last attempt I tried to sing part of Amazing Grace since it’s fairly slow and they use it in the demo video to explain how the site works. My top match came back as a user clip rapping part of a Notorious B.I.G. song. I swear I am not making this up.
The social network aspect to this is what will make it popular, and the search engine will help people group songs that they all sing and compare. Users have a profile page and can add friends, fans, etc. Others rate their recordings. kSolo (acquired by Fox) and SingShot have dabbled in this space successfully.
honestly, im not a fan. it didnt work for me either. there is technology out there that can understand foreign accents, but i suspect its very expensive to use. they have their work cut out from them.
I’m affiliated with midomi. We are very pleased with the feedback we’ve received. Here are a couple tips to help find songs through our voice search.
Make sure your microphone is working properly. A very good way to test this is to sing 10 seconds of Happy Birthday. If you don’t get it in the results, that means there is probably something wrong with the microphone you are using.
Singing at least 10 seconds of any song will make it much more likely to find the correct song.
The search is powered by a database generated by our users’ submissions. This database will continue to grow every day making the search more comprehensive and accurate.
We will soon have a help page that lets you test your microphone.
I must say im impressed. i hit record just for kicks, and didnt say anything. in the distant background lay lady lay was playing softly, and this service correctly matched the Bob Dylan song.
Mike, you’re not alone. I had trouble getting it to recognize the songs I was singing as well. I found I had better luck with songs that had a male clip in their database than on with those that only had a female singer. (Click my name to see my blog post about it from earlier where I detail my testing.)
Also, don’t forget about Bix.
I tried out the service last night for about 1 hour and was very impressed.
I tried to sing some of the popular songs and they picked them up on the first match:
1) happy birthday (of course)
2) yesterday (beatles)
3) In the end (linkin park)
4) skater boy (avril)
5) smells like teen spirits (nirvana)
etc etc …
I consider my music taste as “alternative rock” so there were some songs that couldn’t be found, like System of a Down’s … etc
However, I am really surprised to hear that it didn’t work well for some people … as 2 of my roommates last night were also playing and were also very impressed.
Well, my microphone works perfectly. My voice, not so great I guess. Maybe I’m tone deaf.
it’s not our service, it’s your microphone. i love that
Why? Is this a business or a hobby? Maybe an undergrad CS thesis…
Mike - put the recordings on crunchnotes
yeah. not going to happen.
Nice idea but did not work for me….and my mic is working just fine, I used it all the time including the interface with flash.
In addition, whatever it found, when I tried playing it it crashed my browser.
Good luck guys, as I said, nice but no cigar … at least for me.
Absolutely hilarious post… (Amazing Grace attempt generated Notorious B.I.G result). Reminds me of early days of IBM’s voice recognition software.. truly awful. Why would a company go live with such poor quality?
I tried and it didnt work until i sang Amazing Grace very slowly and it matched me up with some other horrible user’s rendition. This is like American Idol online. blech.
hahaha I love this post
I think you should rap to it now and see what comes up
This might not work perfectly but considering the difficult problem that they are trying to solve then it is not that bad. At least this one startup is based on some technology that they can continue to improve every year with possibly a bussiness model that would be based on selling music online. In my books, it beats all these other social network startups that are based on smoke and mirrors. I wish them the best of luck!
why would i wanna do this in real life? and yeah…i’m a musician and understand “midi” midwhatever and know how its done. I just don’t get the big “why?”
I like hearing other people sing. Now if they held a contest or make it more American Idol Like, it would be quite fun. I sang along with the people…would’ve helped if the site had lyrics to help out.
I think the site concept is quite fun…they need to make it more hip though b/c the site looks dry
Some comments I recieved when I was playing this in the lounge:
“Hey this is like having a friend sing along with you when you’re bored”
“You know what this is? singing karaoke with a friend without being embarassed”
Midomi - you have concept approval from the 19-26 crowd,well at least 7 of us …although the site design and ‘feel’ …yeah not very nice…bland
If it doesn’t find any matches for you, you can’t sing and probably should not try out for American Idol.
As I wrote on my blog , I’m not certain that poo-pooing this company for a phenomena of the web 2.0 bubble is correct. There are a couple of scenarios in my mind where the investors recoup their investment.
http://microsoftstartups.com/b.....fault.aspx
TechCrunch has been really slow lately. It would literally take more than 10-15 seconds to load up. I’m also experiencing quite a few WP errors. Bulk up that hosting package or streamline the site.
Face it Mike, you’re the pimpinest gangsta this side of Compton.
Sorry, but I just dont get the point…
Wouldn’t it be easier to just archive the lyrics of all the songs and let the user try to type in a line or two of the lyrics, if they dont know the name of the song…
Seems to me somebody got to creative.
Just for the record, I actually don’t have a microphone, so haven’t tried the service only commenting on the general idea.
Levon
Tried the same as well. Hummed my heart out but didn’t get the system to recognize anything I hummed… well… guess the algo needs a lot more to work on.
Don’t forget the FIRST humming engine - Nayio (www.nayio.com). We have tried it and it works. Nayio is also one of the Top 100 Alternative* Search Engines (*alternatives to Google) that I have compiled.
If you would like your copy of the Top 100 coolest Search Engines you’ve ever seen, send me an email request to:
Charles@CharlesKnightSEO.com Thanks!
… I couldn’t even get it to load the results page, nevermind try and find a match.
Oh well, move on. Would have been a great way to find music otherwise.
Cool Idea. It was working just a few minutes ago, but while I was setting up my microphone it seems to have died.
Site seems back up now.
If they could just combine the ability of Midomi to recognize what people are singing with the database of The Archive of Misheard Lyrics - http://www.kissthisguy.com/ we would have something both useful and hilarious!
There was a very interesting mashup demo’ed at the mashupcamp that does similar thing but uses Amazon mturk workers…
http://developer.amazonwebserv.....egoryID=24
This is very great startup.
In the seventies I used to be able to go into my local Virgin records and hum any prog rock track that I’d heard on the radio, and the guys there could tell me right away the track, artist and album. They’d stick it on for me in a listening booth and I was in heaven. I thought that was so cool (mind you I was 13). Somehow its not quite the same when a computer does it for me. I tried this and it got “Stairway” straight away, but then struggled with an eclectic collection from Iggy and the Stooges to George Michael (maybe not too surprising). The big downside was that it couldn’t get “Smoke on the Water”… and how can you not get “Smoke” ????
Try http://www.songtapper.com. No singing required, just a little rythm. It’s not perfect, but it works often enough to be useful. The song names are sometimes off, which makes me think that they are using community submissions to build/tune their database.
I tried singing “Yesterday” (Beatles) for more than 10 seconds and it worked. I am not sure it will pick up more obscure songs in foreign languages. But this is not a bad application.
We’ve GOT to get you to a karaoke bar.
read this it’s from some guys blog. Funny lol!
My Review of Midomi
Posted on January 29th and has 3 comments
Filed Under: personal
Midomi is an online service that lets you hum or sing a song into your computer microphone and it will supposedly recognize the song and tell you the title, artist, blah, blah, blah.
Cool, right?
So I tried it out and sang a few bars to “You are not alone” by the genius that is R. Kelly. It guessed that I was singing “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful”.
Ok. It’s a new service, let me try a more reconizable song. I sang “SexyBack” by JT and Midomi thought I was singing “The Farmer In The Dell”. Wow.
I understand that I am not exactly Andrea Bocceli. I understand that I am not even on the level with people who are “going to Hollywood, dawg” on American Idol, but I can hum a song.
At this point I thought that maybe this service is so new that my songs are not in the database. Since it thought my last attempt was “The Farmer In The Dell”, I tried actually singing singing “The Farmer In The Dell”.
It said I was singing “As Long As You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys.
I hate you midomi.
I would love to hear your results from using this service. Please post them in the comments.
Postscript: My wife (who apparently thought I was recording a music video or some sort) informed me that I was lame and needed a better song. She also said, “that’s terrible”.
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