Content Aware Technology for Next Generation Solutions
Since Audible Magic’s founding, the company has invested a great deal of time and resources into developing and acquiring key foundation technologies. These core technologies have been utilized by a wide variety of end-user applications.
Core Audio Fingerprinting
Audio content-based retrieval is major focus of research for the company. With work begun in 1994 by Muscle Fish, Audible Magic possesses the most robust audio fingerprinting technology in the industry. The pioneering research and development effort by Muscle Fish culminated in the granting of its first U.S. patent number 5,918,223. Audible Magic’s proprietary technology dynamically identifies audio content by utilizing psycho-perceptual measures of the content itself for recognition. This approach provides an accurate, non-invasive solution to content identification for all forms of digital media. This accuracy can be achieved because the technology analyzes the characteristics perceived by the human ear. These characteristics tend to be preserved even if the content is subjected to compression, equalization, reasonable time scaling, and other signal processing.
... in the case of Audible Magic, they have 3.5 million fingerprints, which as far as I know, may be the biggest such database in existence.
Audible Magic has emerged as the only viable vendor in their market segment with a wide range of applications.
Reference Database of Copyrighted Works
This industry leading fingerprinting technology has even greater value because of its integration with the world’s largest reference database music. This database has been developed and maintained with the support of its partners such as Loudeye Technologies, SESAC, and CMJ Network, as well as the support of recording industry. The database today identifies over 3.5 million recorded songs with new content added daily.
New Content Detection
Based upon patent pending repeating segment technology, the new creative analysis systems use Audible Magic’s fingerprints to group identical audio segments that repeat over a period of time. New programming content such as ads or songs not resident in the reference database can be tagged for human review. Audible Magic has developed and deployed analysis software to allow human operators to quickly and easily review the audio, identify and classify the content, and add the content to the reference database.
P2P Traffic Monitoring
Based upon the acquisition of the technology and intellectual property acquisition of IpArchive in May 2002, Audible Magic’s P2P traffic monitor technology provides a method of detecting and monitoring transactions of involving digital creative works transmitted over a network. The technology is able to passively monitor the data traffic of a network and capture information about digital media transmission activity. Since the technology is not located ‘in-stream,’ there is no performance impact of the monitoring on the network. Data of interest can be collected for reporting purposes and used to set policies for a bandwidth shaper or firewall, or individual transactions can be blocked in real-time, based on data characteristics specified by the network operator.
Intellectual Property
Muscle Fish, LLC began research in the area of content-based audio classification and retrieval in late 1993 and early 1994. Numerous papers were published based upon this research and outlining applications of the technology.