Owl Music Search: find music with music

by Brad Linder Jul 17th 2007

Music recommendation services are nothing new. Type a favorite band into Pandora, and the service will go to work creating a custom playlist of music you might like.

But Owl Music Search takes the keyboard out of the process. Sure, it's probably quicker to type in a band name than to upload an mp3 file from you collection. But Owl uses some pretty nifty tricks to compare your uploaded track with thousands of other files in its database, many of which are licensed under Creative Commons.

The system is a bit quirky, in that you can only select a short snippet of your song to compare with other tracks. That means you can find other songs that sound like the chorus of your tune, but not the verse, or vice versa. And there's not guarantee that the songs you find will be in the same genre as the song you upload. But at the very least, it's fun to enter a song and see what results Owl spits back at you.

It seems like Owl needs to recognize the file you upload in order to go to work. The first track we tried came up with zero results. Owl is still in the early beta stages, but it might be worth keeping an eye on.

Tags: agregga, music recommendations, music search, MusicRecommendations, MusicSearch, owl, pandora

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