[freebsd-questions] Scanning MP3 files for skips

[Howard Jones]

Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Kyrre Nygard wrote:
>> I'm curious whether there's a tool out there that will scan through
>> audio files looking for patterns that resemble skips and other nonos
>> in the world of music.
>>
>> I have MD5 checksums for all my MP3 files, but that doesn't
>> guarantee that they were fine before the checksums were generated.
>
> Sort of...GraceNote and a few other companies ("Shazam", seems to be
> from India?) sell a service where music files can be fingerprinted and
> identified.  Good audio files ought to ID as what they are; bad music
> files with skips or garbage will fail to ID.
>
Shazam (at least) works on a fragment the song. In the UK they provide a
phone-based service, which only needs 20-30 seconds of clear music to
identify a song. MusicBrainz is a similar type of thing that is
available as a plugin for a number of media players, which I think works
on a whole song, but I don't know that it's precise enough to detect the
odd tick and burp.

I'm also looking for a blip-detecting MP3 tool. I haven't had time to
look at it yet, but I was going to try something like libmad on the
assumption that somewhere internally it knows when it's only had half an
frame of data, even if there is no CRC. That way, it'll work on any
obscure music I have, without relying on some external giant database of
correctness.