Can Audacity do this?

[heaven_inc]

I need a quick yes/no answer to whether Audacity can find a number of times an radio commercial has been ran in a 24 hour recording of a radio broadcast.

So in essence, is there a future similar to "find" feature in a Word document that instead of showing how many times a word appears in a document, would show me how many times and where the specific audio clip shows up in a recording?

Thanks!

[kozikowski]

I'm going with no, but someone could argue with me.

Word is looking for a specific digital signature for the ascii values of the characters. Find Ascii 65 followed by ascii 68 (letter A and letter D).

Good. Now screen capture that word document and open the capture picture in Photoshop. Now find those two letters with Photoshop.

That's much more like what you're asking a sound search to do.

That's not to say you couldn't get some software to do that, but I don't know of any Audacity tools.

Koz

[heaven_inc]

I'm sure it can match the wavelength's.. How else would Shazam match a sound clip you're cording with your phone's microphone to a song in their database?

[kozikowski]

How else would Shazam match a sound clip you're cording with your phone's microphone to a song in their database?

Proprietary software that Audacity doesn't have? And no, it's not remotely that easy. Digging through bad microphones and compression distortion is not for the easily frightened.

Audacity can't split a mixed performance into individual voices, instruments and sounds. So just being to isolate wavelengths or frequencies is beyond Audacity tools. There are plugins and little used built-in tools that might be able to help. Someone will post.

Koz

[steve]

I need a quick yes/no answer to whether Audacity can find a number of times an radio commercial has been ran in a 24 hour recording of a radio broadcast.

Short answer: No.

The fact that you did not accept Koz's answer indicates that you would actually like a longer answer, so here goes:

Audacity does not have any built-in tools for "word search but with sound instead of words".
It would be "possible" to have a plug-in that can do this, but it is quite a complicated task, and I'm not aware of any "production ready" plug-ins that can do it. There's a post here about a very simple implementation that uses cross correlation: viewtopic.php?p=241775#p241775

How else would Shazam match a sound clip you're cording with your phone's microphone to a song in their database?

There's a detailed description in this academic paper (PDF format) by Avery Wang (Shazam's chief scientist and one of its co-founders): http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers ... shazam.pdf