WP7’s Song Recognition Finds Songs In 3 Seconds

The Windows Phone Blog has posted an interview with one of the guys responsible for the music search features that are built in to Mango and they laid out some new details. Notably, instead of capturing a large clip of the song and then uploading it once it’s complete, it works by ‘fingerprinting’ the song by identifying unique points within the song and uploading them every 3 seconds to see if enough data was received to uniquely identify the song. This method is faster and less data intensive than Shazam. It’s so accurate that it can detect the difference between an album and live version of a song. They also tested the hell out of it and tested with soft and extremely loud music. He stated “I spent a lot of time driving to and from work at different speeds with my windows open different amounts—just to make sure we can recognize the songs if the window was all the way open and we were doing 40 m.p.h and had the music blaring.”

Looks like this is a serious service…no beta tag here.