Comment by stoj | January 14, 2008 | 12:03 pm

Are there other providers? Do these guys do that?

http://www.musicip.com/

Comment by jalle | January 14, 2008 | 12:31 pm

Looks like there are several free:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint#Implementations

At least Foosic, MusicIP and MusicDNS. But I guess there could be tecnical problems.

Comment by midel | January 14, 2008 | 2:09 pm

Wow. This is a bummer. This was a very cool app. Yeah I know it’s been around for other phones, but thanks to Erica for building it for the iPhone on her own. Great work!

Now here’s my real beef. This is the sort of service that the RIAA should be falling over itself to fund and promote. This app directly PROMOTES the purchasing of music. It’s in the music industry’s interest to pay for a service like Gracenote. I’m certainly NOT going to pay $1 to ID a single song. Fine. That’s one less song I’m buying.

I wonder if Apple pays for the Gracenote db it uses to ID a CD in iTunes. If so, maybe they could also add this service. When a user IDs a song it could take you to the iTMS for the option to buy. That would benefit both Apple and the music industry.

Comment by martijnve | January 14, 2008 | 2:55 pm

Too bad, maybe you could look into the other providers? musicip/musicDNS looks promising.

Comment by martijnve | January 14, 2008 | 2:56 pm

“MusicIP supports the open source community and is a proud partner of the MetaBrainz Foundation. We offer free MusicDNS licensing for non- commercial use. To learn more, please contact us.”

Comment by swhite | January 14, 2008 | 4:01 pm

Hello Listen.app users,

My name is Stephen White and I am the VP of Product and Content Management at Gracenote. I wanted to respond to some of the thoughtful posts here and make sure there is no confusion around the Gracenote Mobile MusicID solution that is the underlying technology and service being used by the application.

First of all we commend Erica for her application. It is a great application that brings functionality to the iPhone that clearly you as end users would like to have. Our Partner Sony Ericsson has been at the forefront of integrating this type of functionality and has integrated the results into their store, and into recommendations. Their implementation provides many of the functions you have asked for in your comments here and I urge you all to check out their handsets.

Apple is also a Gracenote partner and has the opportunity to integrate this feature into their iPhone platform. We cannot comment on their plans but we urge you to let them know that you would like this feature.

Gracenote’s Mobile MusicID service can be deployed in many ways with many supporting business models. In the case of Sony Ericsson they integrate the feature into the handset and make the feature available free of additional charge to end users. As Erica points out AT&T also makes the feature available on a pay per use model at $1.00 per call. As a business-to-business provider Gracenote does not condone nor dictate the business model our customers decide to deploy.

We are happy you all like the product and are hopeful we can find a way to make it available to you in the near future. If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them.

Thanks,
Stephen

Comment by firebat | January 14, 2008 | 4:30 pm

Is there a way to get a Gracenote license if enough people donate to fund it? I think it could be a viable option (of course this would depend on how much the license costs)

Pingback by RIP iPhone app - Listen @ ??????? | January 14, 2008 | 8:48 pm

[…] RIP Listen.app - ?? Gracenote ??????????????????????Listen ? iPhone ???????????????? […]

Pingback by Erica Sadun stopt noodgedwongen met Listen » Nieuws » iPhoneclub.nl | January 15, 2008 | 3:00 am

[…] van een commerciële licentie zijn hoger dan Erica wil betalen. Wil je alsnog gebruikmaken van Listen, dan kun je voor $1 per keer je iPhone gebruiken om het ID van een muzieknummer te achterhalen. […]

Pingback by PhoneFlore » Archive du blog » Listen.app : RIP | January 15, 2008 | 1:53 pm

[…] Bref, encore une application géniale qui est victime du mercantilisme à outrance… Le billet chez Erica ICI […]

Comment by OzZy | January 15, 2008 | 3:43 pm

Erica, I think you should switch to MusicDNS. I know it wouldn’t exactly be easy, but this is such a great app, I don’t want to see it flushed down the toilet so easily. This is a direct quote from the MusicDNS page

“Open Source Projects

MusicIP supports the open source community and is a proud partner of the MetaBrainz Foundation. We offer free MusicDNS licensing for non- commercial use. To learn more, please contact us.

Link: http://www.musicip.com/dns/index.jsp

Pingback by Listen, riconoscimento canzoni - Pagina 6 - ModMyApple.it | January 15, 2008 | 3:49 pm

[…] per la cronaca… ericasadun.com RIP Listen.app […]

Comment by jd | January 15, 2008 | 7:53 pm

this is kind of like what happened to a guy named walter, except that it was for lyrics instead of tunes.

http://www.pearworks.com/pages/pearLyrics.html

And Stephen, thanks for commenting.

And Erica, how are you not employed by Apple already??? WTF!

Comment by coadyj | January 15, 2008 | 8:15 pm

hey erica, do you think you could reply with a possibily of intergreating a new service. Maybe one of ou could give it a go. If your sick of programming it

Comment by swhite | January 16, 2008 | 1:22 am

Hello all,

I understand all the comments about trying MusicIP or another service. Please note the specific fingerprinting technology used by this application requires in memory databases for fingerprints of the entire song. Some references:

http://ismir2002.ismir.net/proceedings/02-FP04-2.pdf
http://www.stereophile.com/news/11219/

All fingerprinting solutions are different and some better suited for specific use cases than others. I hope we can find a way to work with the iPhone platform soon and we welcome any ideas about how to deploy the solution on this device.

-Stephen

Comment by raistie | January 16, 2008 | 4:53 am

this was the only application
that made my friends go “W O W”
and crazy about the iphone.
and it was thanks to you erica.

i hope someday listen
can work again.
i’ve never seen a better app on
installer.

Comment by jackashe | January 16, 2008 | 6:59 am

I agree with raistie, this is one of the few apps that is fairly amazing. Is there any way you would collaborate with someone to try to use an alternate Track ID service? Especially since people posting here are saying there are free non-commercial versions of this service.

Comment by maxbugno | January 16, 2008 | 11:27 am

Thanks Erica for this extremely beautiful app. (the best since Jailbreak …).

About the licensing problem, why Gracenote doesn’t think about a subscritpion (like Shazam £. 2 per month in England). I think a lot of people like me would do it …

Keep trying, because this app can’t die….

Ciao

Comment by mnidhk | January 17, 2008 | 3:41 am

Erica,

I agree with rest!. This is the best application i ever see. This was the reason that i updated my iphone to a newer firmware.

Don’t let this application die !!
Please look into other services or talk to the stephen guy.

@ stephen

Please confirm that it is possible to subscripe for example a fee of 3 to 10 $ a month.
I will do it !! And i think, when i read the forums, you can earn some real money with it instead of 1 $ for 1 number because nobody shall do it.
If it is a fee per month then everybody will use it and you are the hero.
Please confirm if this is possible.

Thanks in advance.

Comment by Perlova | January 17, 2008 | 9:09 am

The good folks at Gracenote are missing a wonderful opportunity here. Facebook and youTube gave their products away for free to non-commercial users and I’m pretty sure that their owners made a couple of dollars doing this.

Gracenote…..don’t leave this up to Apple to profit from.

Comment by fluppel | January 17, 2008 | 10:46 am

Erica, for all the slow-starters: I thought you were using MusicBrainz fingerprinting in the betas (since you didn’t have a Gracenote developer licence?).

Perhaps you could earn some money for a licence by adding referral links to the corresponding song (and similar ones) ex. in the iTunes app on the iPhone? I was thinking of something like http://www.additune.com/ for mac.

Would a licence fee be one-time or ex. monthly?

Pingback by OS X, iPhone followup at philippe::niquille | January 17, 2008 | 10:52 am

[…] Listen (still very beta) samples 5 seconds of audio input and is able to detect meta data for a tremendous amount of songs based on the MusicBrainz fingerprinting service. It’s all depending on a Gracenote licence now. […]

Comment by river0 | January 17, 2008 | 1:19 pm

I’ve had the same experience raistie’s had: friends going bonkers over Listen. Motivated two of them to go buy iPhones, a smart move since 1.3 has hit. But the BEST sign that Listen is powerful came when I showed it t my wife. She could care less about gadgets and basically has pretended to be interested in whatever I show her on my iPhone. But when I showed her Listen, she suddenly became VERY interested. If it caught HER attention, that means there’s a huge market for Listen. Perlova’s comment that Gracenotes is missing an opportunity here is an understatement. And I love fluppel’s additune idea. Listen is just too good not to survive.

Pingback by Listen per iPhone … Morto!!! « ::: ANNO 2008 ::: varie ed eventuali … sul mondo IT e non solo! Crockard’s Weblog! | January 18, 2008 | 12:01 pm

[…] info: “RIP Listen.app” on EricaSadun.com more info: […]

Comment by Sherman | January 19, 2008 | 9:20 am

Hi Erica, are You still working on Listen.app or is it a real RIP?
Best regards
Sherman (http://www.photo.smartlog.dk/)

Comment by JuiCe | January 19, 2008 | 11:45 pm

I’m interested in the cost of the license. I’m sure it’s incredibly expensive (especially for use in completely free software) but I’m interested in how difficult it would be to raise the money. I would donate around $100 to save its life.

Comment by Rio | January 21, 2008 | 12:39 am

Mr. Gracenote
Don’t let the Listen App. Die.!!

Comment by seron | January 21, 2008 | 12:50 pm

I also would be willing to donate some money. They clearly on their website claim they offer licenses specifically for non-commercial (i.e., non-revenue generating) projects. If it’s a few thousand dollars you post at digg and some iphone forums, I have no doubt you would be able to get quite a few donations to have this application. Remember, the iPhone isn’t particularly cheap. A large fraction of owners are undoubtedly comfortably well off.

Can you let us know what the license fee is? Or is that a contractual secret.

Comment by seron | January 21, 2008 | 12:51 pm

Oops. missed the part about the license not being available for non-commercial licensing. Are we talking $20k annual here or something?

Comment by maxbugno | January 25, 2008 | 11:21 am

Any news.

Nobody answers.

What’s happening? Have you been eaten by Cloverfield’s monster?

Comment by Erica Sadun | January 25, 2008 | 11:23 am

Pretty much–busy as anything with the 1.1.3 update.

For now Listen remains RIP.

Comment by maxbugno | January 25, 2008 | 11:37 am

Thanks for the answer.

We all love you!

Comment by caquino | January 29, 2008 | 2:08 pm

Hi Erica,
First of all thanks for all your hard work, I’m writing one app similar to your Listen but using MusicBrainz and MusicID, are you thinking in release your deprecated projects sources ?

If yes I’ll be glad to use your work (and retain credits for you for sure) and just do the modification to use musicbrainz and musicid.

Thanks in advance!

Comment by noizviolation | February 6, 2008 | 8:23 pm

How can I use this with 1.1.3?

Comment by transam98 | February 7, 2008 | 12:57 am

I just upgraded my phone to 1.12, and I see Listen isnt on the installer anymore, Is there a way I can manually install it sinc I still have the files ? If someone can help me I may even be willing to paypal you a small fee Email me at: cl1 @ hd-tv.com thanks in advance

Comment by mnidhk | February 14, 2008 | 5:26 am

@ caquino

Can you give some info about your progress about the new listen you are making. Still working on it??

Pingback by Maybe Sony bought Gracenote so that Apples iPhone 2.0 will not be able to listen | Scharnetzki´s - line of reasoning | April 30, 2008 | 1:18 am

[…] “Listen. Motivated two of them to go buy iPhones, a smart move since 1.3 has hit. But the BEST sign that Listen is powerful came when I showed it t my wife. She could care less about gadgets and basically has pretended to be interested in whatever I show her on my iPhone. But when I showed her Listen, she suddenly became VERY interested. If it caught HER attention, that means there’s a huge market for Listen.”Source: http://ericasadun.com/?p=143 […]

Pingback by Maybe Sony bought Gracenote so that Apples iPhone 2.0 will not be able to listen | Scharnetzki´s - line of reasoning | April 30, 2008 | 1:27 am

[…] 1) January 7th 2008: Listen.app for hacked iPhones is released http://ericasadun.com/?p=126. The developer Erica Sadun released beginning of January 2008 an iPhone application that makes use of the Gracenote sound recognition service to identify title, artist and album for any music that the application would “hear”. Users could click on a link to go to iTunes to buy the song directly online (not fully functional in the beta). User feedback to Listen.app is extremely positive: “Listen. Motivated two of them to go buy iPhones, a smart move since 1.3 has hit. But the BEST sign that Listen is powerful came when I showed it t my wife. She could care less about gadgets and basically has pretended to be interested in whatever I show her on my iPhone. But when I showed her Listen, she suddenly became VERY interested. If it caught HER attention, that means there’s a huge market for Listen.” Source: http://ericasadun.com/?p=143 […]

Comment by Anson | May 29, 2008 | 4:36 pm

@ mnidhk, caquino

From what I can tell, Listen is just VNotes that posts the short recorded audio sample to a Web Service (e.g. Gracenote’s TrackID) and displays the returned track information.

The Web Service needs to be able to accept a fairly short duration audio sample, check it against a large database of possibilies, and return any matching track data.

IIRC, the MusicDNS developer’s guide states that it requires at least 135 seconds of audio data to generate the fingerprint, which is THEN used to look up the track data.

So therein lies the problem; those that have the ability to do audio waveform recognition generally want to be well compensated for their highly specialized product.

It looks like we’ll have to wait for someone with a big enough wallet to license a commercial service to the application end-users… it seems like Apple would be in the ideal position to provide this type of service/application.

Comment by Maurice_Bonn | January 5, 2009 | 3:51 am

Hi Erica,

I as most of the world liked “LISTEN”.
Can you contact me for a possible partnership?
I would like to know what the licensefee would be of this dbase provider.

Regards,

Maurice