Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is "finding music through music™"?

Finding music through music is what our search and recommendation is all about – the experience of finding new music based on the sound of your music. See our tutorial for details on how. Just go to www.owlmm.com. Briefly, you pick a track from your own collection of music or sound, select a small segment (the part of the track that you want to use as your "seed sound"), and hit search. We'll return results with related sound.

But what does "related sound" mean?

Our engine uses patent-pending proprietary algorithms to characterize sound based on the actual features of the sound signal. These features include spectral information (such as values and ranges in pitches and harmonies), as well as information about the structure of the sound over time.

Sometimes I get amazing results from the Owl Multimedia search engine, but other times not. What's up with that?

Our engine uses an objective score of sound similarity, but it may be more general than the particular notion of similarity that you have in mind at any given moment. We want you to be able to find music with analogous structure across vastly different genres and styles. Sometimes folks want that. If you want something that "feels more like" your seed track you can do two things to help narrow the search:

carefully pick the seed clip segment from your track by sliding the blue selector to the most relevant part of your track, and/or;
using the genre filters that you'll find on the left of the search page, to eliminate genres that you don't want.

I put in my favorite tune, "Blah" by the "Blah-Blahs," and your search engine didn't find it as part of the results. What gives?

That's not the kind of search engine that OwlMM provides. Please see the first question on the FAQ

I press play and nothing happens.

Try giving it a little while, and please bear with us. Due to the overwhelming popularity of our service, our servers are sometimes gasping to keep up. It may take several seconds for clips to begin streaming. We're growing our infrastructure, so check back often for ever-improving experiences.

I get "clip unavailable." What's going on?

If you're running certain Linux distributions, this may be the result of poor support for audio mixers in the Java Virtual Machine. Please send a feedback bug report to us. One workaround that may help is to kill the mixer daemon on your system, such as artsd, esd, JACK, rplay, NAS, yiff,... (at least if you want to try out our site), and then restart it when you're done. If that isn't your issue, send us feedback. If you're a Linux Java sound guru and want to help us work around the problem, please get in touch.

The site doesn't work for me. What should I do?

Try to ask a more specific question and read on, or send us feedback. What exactly doesn't work? What are you doing and what results do you see? If your issue is one described in the FAQ, then read about it. If you're still having problems, please take a moment to send us feedback (just look at the bottom of any owlmm.com page) and let us know about the problem. Please try to describe what you clicked, and what you did or didn't see or hear. If you can tell us the date and time when the problem occurred, that will help us to debug. If you are a registered user, please include your user id.


	Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) What is "finding music through music™"? Finding music through music is what our search and recommendation is all about – the experience of finding new music based on the sound of your music. See our tutorial for details on how. Just go to www.owlmm.com. Briefly, you pick a track from your own collection of music or sound, select a small segment (the part of the track that you want to use as your "seed sound"), and hit search. We'll return results with related sound. But what does "related sound" mean? Our engine uses patent-pending proprietary algorithms to characterize sound based on the actual features of the sound signal. These features include spectral information (such as values and ranges in pitches and harmonies), as well as information about the structure of the sound over time. Sometimes I get amazing results from the Owl Multimedia search engine, but other times not. What's up with that? Our engine uses an objective score of sound similarity, but it may be more general than the particular notion of similarity that you have in mind at any given moment. We want you to be able to find music with analogous structure across vastly different genres and styles. Sometimes folks want that. If you want something that "feels more like" your seed track you can do two things to help narrow the search: carefully pick the seed clip segment from your track by sliding the blue selector to the most relevant part of your track, and/or; using the genre filters that you'll find on the left of the search page, to eliminate genres that you don't want. I put in my favorite tune, "Blah" by the "Blah-Blahs," and your search engine didn't find it as part of the results. What gives? That's not the kind of search engine that OwlMM provides. Please see the first question on the FAQ I press play and nothing happens. Try giving it a little while, and please bear with us. Due to the overwhelming popularity of our service, our servers are sometimes gasping to keep up. It may take several seconds for clips to begin streaming. We're growing our infrastructure, so check back often for ever-improving experiences. I get "clip unavailable." What's going on? If you're running certain Linux distributions, this may be the result of poor support for audio mixers in the Java Virtual Machine. Please send a feedback bug report to us. One workaround that may help is to kill the mixer daemon on your system, such as artsd, esd, JACK, rplay, NAS, yiff,... (at least if you want to try out our site), and then restart it when you're done. If that isn't your issue, send us feedback. If you're a Linux Java sound guru and want to help us work around the problem, please get in touch. The site doesn't work for me. What should I do? Try to ask a more specific question and read on, or send us feedback. What exactly doesn't work? What are you doing and what results do you see? If your issue is one described in the FAQ, then read about it. If you're still having problems, please take a moment to send us feedback (just look at the bottom of any owlmm.com page) and let us know about the problem. Please try to describe what you clicked, and what you did or didn't see or hear. If you can tell us the date and time when the problem occurred, that will help us to debug. If you are a registered user, please include your user id. Home \| About Owl Multimedia \| Send Us Your Feedback \| Report a Bug \| FAQ \| Blog Copyright © 2007 Owl Multimedia, Inc. All rights reserved.