I agree, it looks like a hard problem to me too... esp. given the fact that so many of the songs have same scale and chord progressions

'Shazaam' iPhone/Android app does nearly that... it can identify the song by listening to a part of the actual recorded song. But it still can't identify the one that you sing or play on an instrument... I am pretty sure they'll be working on something like this...

Shazaam doesn't do what I describe, it just tries to match part of a performance to the recording of that exact performance.

In my experience, it also doesn't really work.

Anecdotally, it works very well for me the last few years. On the other hand, Gracenote — which Path uses — has been terrible for me.

Does Shazaam not work well for you for a particular genre?

To be fair, I didn't test it extensively, but the couple of times I tried it (on French songs, mainly) it failed.

I also don't fully understand the use case, except maybe if you listen to a lot of radio in a car?

At home the music that comes out of my speakers is music I already own; sometimes I listen to radio but even then it's usually faster and more certain to just go to the station's website to check what music was playing a few minutes ago, than to be able to launch Shazaam before the song has finished playing.

Now if I could sing into an app that would be completely different.

Ah. I've only tried in on English (language) songs. It's handy if you are out in a cafe or otherwise, public area and want to identify a song.

Singing into the app would be cool. In my ex-company, there were folks working on getting it to work for Karaoke. So you can hum a song and it'll figure out the right track for you to sing with. I don't know if there's a commercialised product like this.

To shazaam's credit, it identifies popular songs even in non-english languages (Bollywood, Italian, several French songs; anecdotal evidence anyway)

yup, it only matches the exact parts but that it does that very well, It even identified a very old and unpopular song in Marvadi language (a minor dailect of hindi, spoken in some parts of Rajasthan, an Indian state). that must mean that they maintain a very extensive database...

am i the only one who thinks this is not at all like stealing... if some one stole your car you'll not have it any more... you will be devoid of it... not the same in this case

It would be nice to have a very basic starter's tutorial involving stuff like 'how to install and setup python, how to work with python shell' absolute beginners might find it useful...

Isn't that stuff already very well documented in Python's own documentation?

I was thinking if it could be made into a wiki... but guest posts would be great for now. I just really like the site as it is the format that learn in, so I shared it here... I have requested the site owner to join this discussion... hopefully they'll like some suggestions here.

Ever heard of Paul Graham's Python Paradox http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html its a little old but still awesome and relevent

It's relevant if you replace Python with something newer.

I seriously think such a site should go 'wiki' and allow addition/editing of posts by public (moderated, of course). that would be a good idea to implement for any programming language

agreed... despite of a nice interface, the site does lack organization and some super beginner stuff, I did overlook the absence of those...

Super Beginner stuff is on the standard python tutorial. That normally doesn't need to be on every website.

Well, this is "Python for Beginners", so that name will attract the kind of person who has never touched the command line. Likely they'll be using a system in which Python is already installed, but they still won't know how to access it.

Another thing to keep in mind: this kind of beginner will also have trouble finding these "standard" tutorials that have up-to-date info. No, it's not that they can't use Google, but they don't have enough technical sense to tell what's a good source of this installation info from what's a bad source. Hence, it's good to have this super-basic info packaged into any kind of tutorial that purports to be for "beginners".

True. A search for python tutorial returns the official python tutorial. But, I hear your point. It should be added, or a least a link to the very beginner material should be provided.

really trumps me... almost every coder I have ever met who has tried hands on python loves it...(easy to see why) and there isn't any scarcity of em. yet, its proving difficult to find a python guy to hire for our startup...

Where are you looking? There is a massive community of python developers on linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=25827

I realize it was pretty dumb of me to forget about linkedin groups... thanks. But the fact still holds (atleast in my country, India... scenario might be different for different countries or even localities) 'number of coders in java' > 'number of coders in python'

PyCon India and foss.in are good events to meet passionate developers. Likewise, local developer meetups (like Bangpypers; Banglore python group), are another great venues.

``'number of coders in java' > 'number of coders in python'

Well, that is a no-brainer, since its the most popular language taught in colleges with C++ a close second. That said, there are a _lot_ of smarties coming out of colleges and its just a matter of polishing the diamonds in the rough before they get 'lured in' by low paying IT companies. I don't see why Joel Spolsky's tactic of 'snatching' promising young talents before even hitting their final year in college won't work; albeit a little work from your part.

Not dumb. I only discovered Linkedin Python groups yesterday. I didn't mean to come off as condescending.

It's cool... that wasn't condescending. I actually never thought of my linkedin connections/groups as potential co-workers...

Not very surprising. When I think of connections, I rarely think of Linkedin. I don't know what sucks about it, but something surely does :)

All the data mentioned there is all good... but I would suggest that you put some reference links to back it up...