comparison - Comparing sound files if not completely identical

Question

Is there any way to programatically compare two sound files to determine if they are identical, or nearly identical? These are not mp3 files and do not have any ID3 or other meta data, but plain wav files. Comparing the checksum values may not work as they may not be completely identical.

Answer 1

The wikipedia article on acoustic fingerprinting mentions a number of products, including the opensource libfooid. Basically you're looking at going into the frequency domain, taking rough levels over a relatively small number of bands (say 32), to give you a string that represents something like 25ms of sound, doing that for the whole file, then doing a fuzzing comparison of those strings for different files. It's fairly complex, but needs doing - comparing the actual samples won't get you anywhere as something as simple as a volume shift by a few percent will throw out the whole match.