Find Similar Songs with Audiobaba

Music recommendation services like Audiobaba have been in existence for a while now. Some, like Pandora, search and stream music via Internet radio, while others, like Musicovery, use interactive websites to power their recommendations.

Both are great services and I'm still using them from time to time to find new songs and artists that I never heard of before. I used to get my recommendations from terrestrial radio before but since they began to only play the same top 100 songs over and over again I had to shift my attention to a new medium that was better suited to discover new music.

Audiobaba is a new service that I have not heard of before. You begin be entering either a song title, album or artist in the search field.This is a song or artist that you like of course. All results that match the keywords that you have entered are then shown on the next page. You can then listen to samples from all songs that have been found. The samples are usually between 20 seconds and 1 minute.

Once you have found the song that you have been looking for you can click on the "match" button which searches the database of songs again for matches, that is songs and artists that sound similar to the selection that you have made. One of my favorite songs of all time is Vincent by Don McLean and Audiobaba gave me more than 40 matches of songs. Some of them did fit very well with the overall theme of the song Vincent and some did not.

It is however very easy to distinguish between those songs, just listen to them and give them a thumbs down if you think they do not match or bookmark them instead and go back when you have the time to listen to them. Bookmarking them means that they are added to a personal page at Audiobaba. You may be wondering how they find out if two songs are similar to each other, here is their answer:

Audiobaba is powered by a complex artificial intelligence and years of academic research on sound and music. Our computer algorithms 'listen' to music and compare it for multitudes (we can't tell you the exact number but its over 70) of acoustic qualities like beats, rhythm, and all that jazz.

It would be more than interesting to get more opinions on the success rate of that algorithm. If you did use the service, did the recommended songs match the one that you entered?

Audiobaba is no longer available. You can use the Musicovery service instead, or a recommendation service like Taste Kid.

To use it, simply select music on the main page and enter a song, artist or band that you like. You are presented with a list of related artists that you can check out right away with a click on a band's or artist's name on the results page.

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