iPhone’s Shazam Application Crashes While Attempting to Discern Differences Between Nickelback Songs
Los Angeles, CA – A possible bug in the Shazam application for Apple’s iPhone was discovered today when it was revealed the program crashes and the phone locks up whenever it tries to find any discernible difference between Nickelback songs.
The problem was first noticed when seventeen year old high-school junior Doug Royce heard a Nickelback song playing on KSHT, Larely’s Top 40 radio station. Royce said, “I had just downloaded the Shazam app [application] the night before because I had seen the sweet new TV ad for it. On my way to school the next morning, I heard a Nickelback song that I liked, but wasn’t sure of its name. I remembered Shazam, so I pulled out my phone and held it up to the car speaker. After about fifteen seconds, the phone vibrated like it was sending off the information. Then the entire screen went black and the phone went dead. I had to do the manual reboot in order to get it working again.” Royce also said that he tried using Shazam to match a different Nickelback song played back over a school computer, but had the same result. “I figured I’d play ‘This is How You Remind Me’ to see if Shazam recognized it or not, but the same damn thing happened.”
Shazam, an application which uses the iPhone to capture sound and seeks out the song’s information based on an acoustic fingerprint, has skyrocketed in popularity since Apple began featuring it in their television ads for the iPhone. When Shazam is successful in finding a matching fingerprint to a song, it will display the artist, album, title, and genre of the song, as well as links to download it in iTunes.
Andrew Fisher, Chief Executive Officer of Shazam, doesn’t believe the issues lie in the Shazam program, but rather with the fact that “Harmonically, there is no difference between any of Nickelback’s songs. Every god damn one is the same. We tried to create digital fingerprints for twenty different songs of theirs, and we were unable to because they kept coming back as identical. Obviously, we don’t want the software to crash, but there isn’t much we can do when the program is trying to list twenty different songs at once.”
The executive board of Shazam has already called an emergency meeting to see what they can do to right the problem. However, one thing they can’t do is create differences in the songs themselves. They’ve discussed a few options, the most popular being that when a Nickelback song is queried by a Shazam user, it defaults to a screen that says, “Artist: Nickelback, Song: Not sure, they’re all shitty, Album: See song description.”
If they decide that to be the best solution to the problem, they will release an updated version of the software and iPhone users will be made aware of the update next time they open iTunes on their computer.
