Ok, here’s my attempt at a blog post, mimicking the style you described.
## Shazam Shaq: My Weekend Project from Zero to… Something
Alright folks, so this weekend I decided I was gonna build something cool. I had this burning desire to, you know, identify Shaq songs. I mean, how many bangers did the big man actually drop? I needed answers. Thus, “Shazam Shaq” was born (at least in my head).
First things first, I needed some kinda way to listen to a song and figure out what it was. So, I started digging around for audio fingerprinting stuff. Found a bunch of libraries, but decided to go with one in Python, looked easy enough. Got it installed, which took longer than I care to admit because I always forget to use venv. Rookie mistake, I know.
Then came the fun part: gathering Shaq tracks. This involved a lot of late-night YouTube searches and some, uh, creative audio ripping techniques. Let’s just say I now have a folder full of Shaq-Fu: Da Return MP3s.
Next up, the code. This is where things got hairy. The library I was using had some example code, but it wasn’t exactly plug-and-play. Spent a good chunk of Saturday wrestling with it, trying to understand how the audio fingerprinting actually worked. Lots of trial and error, lots of print statements, and even more coffee.
- First, I tried to create the fingerprint of each of Shaq’s song.
- Then I tried to check whether my fingerprinting matched with other songs.
- It didn’t went well at first, but after hours of debugging, I got it right
The Big Test
Sunday rolled around, and it was time to put Shazam Shaq to the test. I played a random Shaq track, fed it to my script, and crossed my fingers. And…drumroll please…it worked! Sort of. It correctly identified “What’s Up Doc? (Can We Rock)” about 60% of the time. Not exactly a perfect score, but hey, it was something.
Turns out, audio quality really matters. The crummier the MP3, the harder it was for the algorithm to work. Also, noisy environments threw it off completely. So, Shazam Shaq wasn’t exactly ready for prime time.
Lessons Learned:
- Audio fingerprinting is harder than it looks.
- Shaq has more songs than I realized.
- I need to learn more about signal processing.
Will I turn Shazam Shaq into a real app? Probably not. But it was a fun weekend project, and I learned a ton. And who knows, maybe someday I’ll be able to automatically identify any Shaq track that comes my way. A man can dream, right?
