Comparing sound files if not completely identical

Question

Is there any way to programatically compare two sound files to determine if they are identical, or nearly identical? These are not mp3 files and do not have any ID3 or othe

Answer 1

The process for comparing a set of sounds for similarities is called Content Based Audio Indexing, Retrieval, and Fingerprinting in computer science research.

One method of doing this is to:

1) Run several bits of signal processing on each audio file to extract features, such as pitch over time, frequency spectrum, autocorrelation, dynamic range, transients, etc.

2) Put all the features for each audio file into a multi-dimensional array and dump each multi-dimensional array into a database

3) Use optimization techniques (such as gradient descent) to find the best match for a given audio file in your database of multi-dimensional data.

The trick to making this work well is which features

There are several projects that do stuff like this, including MusicBrainz, and EchoNest.

Echonest has one of the simplest APIs I've seen in this space. Very easy to get started.

P.S. No I do not work for Echonest, nor do I know anyone who works there.