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

One thing that you could try that would give you a fairly decent fingerprint of the file is taking a Fourier transform and looking at the distribution of different frequencies present in the file. It's still very possible to make two very different sound files that have the same Fourier transform, but that's somewhat unlikely if your files are coming from a non-contrived source...