If you already know about the music search feature a.k.a. Bing Audio, then you have probably already mentioned it’s no different than other applications already available on the Windows Phone marketplace. Microsoft sat down with the team behind Bing Music Search (apparently it won’t be called Bing Audio) for a Q&A session over at the Windows Phone Blog to find out just what makes it so different. Just from reading the first few paragraphs of the article which cut right to the point, we can tell you that Bing Music Search is definitely different. We will quote some parts of the article below that we felt were the most informational, but feel free to go read the full article yourself, we strongly recommend it.
Q: So, guys, first tell me: What can I do with Music search?
Elliot: The basic scenario is that you’re listening to some music that you’ve never heard—or you hear a song you like but don’t remember the name of it. In Mango, you can just pull out your phone and within seconds get the name of the song or artist and also a link to the Zune music store so you can download or buy it.
Steve: Anything you can buy in Zune Marketplace you can find with Music search.
Q: Some apps in Marketplace can already do this—the identifying part, at least. How is Music search different?
Steve : Most other apps listen to a song for a fixed amount of time, and then analyze and try to match it. One of the things we do differently is we’re continuously listening and analyzing. As soon as we know what the song is, we return the result to you.
Houston: What this means is that you might actually get near instant results in the extreme case.
Q: That’s cool. How does Music search work?
Steve: We’re using the microphone to record and then doing something called ”fingerprinting,” where we look for unique acoustic features of the music. We listen for about 3 seconds, create a fingerprint, and then we send that fingerprint to Bing, which looks for a match in the Zune music catalog.
Elliot: If it doesn’t find one, we send another 3-second slice until we get a result.
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