Yahoo! Launches Audio Search Beta

guaigean writes "Internet News is running a story on a new Yahoo! service titled Yahoo! Audio Search and it is currently in beta. The tool allows the searching of audio files and Yahoo! claims to have 50 million music, voice, and other files cataloged in the search. It searches across multiple mainstream music sites, as well as plenty of independent pages. Now if only it was tied in with some sort of lyric search."

Copyrighted materials

[zweistein2]

They actually encourage you to try a search on copyrighted materials (i.e. Coldplay), but if you do, it gives you a list of fee-based audio services where you can buy the song(s). No illegal stuff here, move along :). Non-copyrighted materials have download links next to them. I prefer archive.org, as a matter of fact, at least I'm certain what is under a Creative Commons licence there.

Re:Wow.. step ahead?

[tonsofpcs]

http://www.altavista.com/audio/default [altavista.com] has been around for quite some time. How is this an innovation?

Re:Baidu, the "Chinese Google" has something simil

[Coryoth]

If a company can be sued over it in China, where copyright restrictions are very lax, how successful will Yahoo! be in implementing this here in a country where copyrights are taken much more seriously?

Pretty successful. Have you actually tried it? It doesn't take you to illegal free copies, it provides links to copies to buy.

For instance, searching for a semi-obscure ambient band that I quite like turned up lots of hits. Selecting a track takes you to this page [yahoo.com] which tells you various places you can buy and download it. It's quite a nice service really - think of it as akin iTMS search that runs over multiple different major music stores and provides options, or Froogle for downloadable music. Excellent if you like hard to find music (that often isn't in CD stores) like myself, or even if you simply want to shop around (though 99c seems to be the rate pretty much everywhere, so comparison shopping is limited). I could definitely see this catching on.

Way to go Yahoo! you actually came up with someting interesting and new for a change.

Jedidiah.

Re:Wow.. step ahead?

[Jarlsberg]

Google lets you use the following query: "springsteen filetype:mp3" to search for mp3 files with springsteen in the file name. I don't use Yahoo on principle, so I haven't seen how it works and whether it's better than Google in any way.

Re:Copyrighted materials

[Coryoth]

They actually encourage you to try a search on copyrighted materials (i.e. Coldplay), but if you do, it gives you a list of fee-based audio services where you can buy the song(s).

Sure, but they provide a nice overview. The coldplay seach for instance gives you this [yahoo.com] (after you select a specific track). Now not only is there a free download version via ArtistDirect, it provides a nice pricing guide for comparison shopping (with both buy and download and subscription options priced), as well as actually listing salient features for the different services offering pay download, salient features being: Format (MP3, AAC, WMA, etc.), Platform (Looks like Win or Mac only), "Burn to CD" and "Copy" which presumably is details on the DRM and license restrictions. If I want to buy music online (and apparently many people do) then being able to get and overview like that with pricing, format and DRM options all listed for quick reference counts as a very good thing.

It may not suit your needs, but it does look like an interesting service.

Jedidiah.

Re:Wow.. step ahead?

[Coryoth]

This service is more akin to froogle than to straight google - it's abotu comparison shopping ove r the various different pay to download services. To their credit they bother to let you comparison shop not just on price, but on format and DRM/license restrictions. This isn't a replacement for finding your favourite illegal download, it is potentially a replacement for just running your search on iTMS for that song you want to buy.

Jedidiah.

I was sceptical

[Mrs. Grundy]

Being a classical music geek, I am always skeptical, and i suppose somewhat jaded, in this world that worships the latest pop idol, so I said to myself, "yeah, we'll see about this" and popped into the search field the text from Walt Whitman, "Behold the sea" used by Ralph Vaughan Williams" in his first symphony. What do you know. It even even had a link to the apple i-tunes store which open itunes to the track. Next I tried "Ich habe genug" and not only did I get a handful of recordings of Bach's cantata BWV 82, it also found the recitative from the Magnificat. Thinking maybe it only indexed the titles, I tried some interior text from the cantata like "Mein Trost ist nur allein" and it still found it. This works much better than I expected. Cool.

You mean like this?

[nohup]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/23/222925 5&tid=141&tid=126 [slashdot.org]
http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home [shazam.com]
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/5393. html [petting-zoo.net]

No SFX ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When reading this I thought it would be great to search random sfx-files, eg. audio files of 'screaming', 'crying' etc., but when I tried those I only get commercial albums of bands/singers.

Even the Wilhelm scream comes up empty :/

Re:I'd like...

[jesser]

Query by Humming at CS.NYU [nyu.edu] works for me some of the time.

Re:Wow.. step ahead?

[Momoru]

Why don't you try checking out this site: http://next.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] . It's full of cool Yahoo innovations (like Google Labs). A lot of the apps on there don't get mentioned on Slashdot for some reason, but most are really cool.

Gofish does it better

[mir@ge]

http://www.gofish.com/ [gofish.com]

I didn't -- cough -- work on this or anything. Really.