Music Search

Been a while since I've looked a music search engines, so I thought I'd better have a look at a few more. Here a system called 'Audiobaba', with searches using the bowie/berlin query set.

• David Bowie Low.


• David Bowie "Heroes".


• David Bowie lodger.


• Iggy Pop lust for life, (0 hits for either query)


• David Bowie the man who sold the world, (0 hits).


• David Bowie hunky dory, (0 hits)


• David Bowie Aladdin Sane.


• David Bowie ziggy stardust.

Impressions. It didn't like my queries above, and returned nothing for three queries before I gave up. I then tried just the name which came up with a list of albums songs and films to which Bowie was associated with. Links to queries I tried are presented above. It only plays samples of the songs currently. Without the ability to refine the query in another way (e.g. by artist), the service is rather limited. Searching on just one element made the queries rather ambigious sometimes (e.g. see heroes query above). There is a way to refine the query by choosing 'mainstream', 'normal' and 'independents' which is only available once you have done a search. I'm not sure of the distinction between 'mainstream' and 'normal' (these terms are not explained on the website), but I assume that the scheme is partly based on label type ('independents').

If you can get a query to work, the results then become very interesting. The service is billed as a recommender search engine, and clicking on a hit from a search brings up a list of similar songs based on the analysis of the audio, according to the FAQ.