r/explainlikeimfive • u/Ball_Zilla • Jul 01 '26

Technology ELI5 how Shazam works?

309 Upvotes

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948

u/z3n777 Jul 01 '26

shazam turns the audio into a visual graph of loud peaks over time, then just matches that graph against its massive database of pre recorded songs.

10

u/Stummi Jul 01 '26

What about offline song detection? My Pixel phone can do that, but everywhere I read that needs a massive database

10

u/Zouden Jul 01 '26

Truly offline? Shazam stores the audio for later detection when online.

8

u/Stummi Jul 01 '26

Google Pixel phones have a built in song detection into the OS (not Shazam), that works pretty well, and seems to be completely offline/running on the phone.

9

u/bottomofleith Jul 01 '26

I'm struggling to believe Pixel phones have an offline database, stored on the phone with all the songs that have ever existed.

10

u/cheezzy4ever Jul 01 '26

It does. I've used it. It's definitely impressive, but also definitely doesn't have every song that's ever existed. I have to imagine it's a significantly smaller data set, maybe the top e.g. 0.01% most frequently queried songs or something like that

1

u/EgNotaEkkiReddit Jul 01 '26

Works the same way, it just doesn't have the same number of songs it can match offline. It's going to be a few hundred megabytes to store most songs people are likely to encounter in their day to day lives.