How to find a short audio clip inside of a larger audio clip?

November 16, 2011 10:24 AM

Is there a Windows application that will search audio files for a clip? I'm not looking for a web search, but something that will take a short clip and look within larger clips for the same audio.

I have 96 hours of audio in 1 hour chucks and a separate 30 second clip that is of lower quality in mp3 format. I know somewhere in that 96 hours of audio, that 30 second clip is used a couple of times. The short clip has lower fidelity (plenty of hiss) but is otherwise is identical.

What method can I use to find the short clip contained within the larger files?

It's sung lyrics, but there's also some spoken parts. So something that tries to do speech recognition "might" work. The files are on the web as well, but I don't think a web based search engine is going to work (not sure they would be indexed).

posted by inthe80s to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I don't have a direct answer for this...but one term you might want to look into more is audio fingerprinting. It's basically the technology that allows smartphone apps to identify songs by humming portions of it in a microphone. It's also a technology that's used by many media providers to identify copyrighted material if it is uploaded (eg. when youtube shows an add to purchase the music that is playing in a user made video)
posted by samsara at 6:36 AM on November 18, 2011