Hello all,
I am in the final stages of launching my station. It will be terrestrial (following Part 15 law) and simulcast on a stream (which I already have set up and has tested excellent).
As we all know, internet can be a real pain and the legalities are even more painful. SoundExchange is a bear in that you've got to report the metadata to them every month. My signal chain has my encoder (Audio Hijack) picking up metadata form Radiologik which then my streaming people pick up and send me in a spreadsheet every month for the purpose of sending it to SoundExchange. However, if I play records or have live DJs (anything that isn't going through RadioLogik, iTunes, Spotify, et. al.) then my streaming service gets no metadata and I have to manually enter or have my DJs manually enter that info/keep track of what they played so I can deal with it every month.
I spoke to a representative at my streaming service (Broadcast Matrix, excellent folks) and guy mentioned to me that there are audio recognition software out in the world (much like a Shazam app) that will catch audio, recognize it and spit out metadata for your encoder or streaming service or whatever. Does anyone know if this is true and if so, do they make a Mac friendly version?
This would really solve a lot of headaches with reporting things and staying on the up and up. I have been listening to online stations like The Lot (Brooklyn) and RedLightRadio (Amsterdam) and I see lots of people playing records and CDJs but never anyone keeping track of the songs or artists. Surely they are compiling this info somewhere or I would think (maybe naiveté?) that they wouldn't be up and streaming if they weren't paying the bills/keeping records of what they are playing.
Thoughts? Wisdom?