LONDON, UK - Musiio by SoundCloud, the industry leader in descriptive music metadata, has announced the release of a new service - the Timecodes & Cue Points API. This innovative, AI-powered service offers users AI-generated timecodes for their songs, providing invaluable data for music library owners, streaming platforms and more.
The Timecodes & Cue Points API offers three key features: Silence Detection, Vocal Start/Stop timings and Segment Selection.
Vocal Start/Stop & Silence Detection
Silence Detection identifies silence at the start and end of tracks which can be used for seamless play functionality.
The Vocal Start/Stop tool takes this concept a step further, producing timecodes for the moment a vocal starts and stops. This can speed up catalogue browsing exponentially.
Music catalogues are expected to make it quick for users to find the perfect music. Imagine a music supervisor looking to pinpoint a vocal track for a scene. Scanning hundreds of tracks is time-consuming, so the ability to skip straight to a vocal can save many hours of needless labour.
It also has potential uses in podcasting and DJ software, where knowing when the vocal starts is paramount for fluid transitions and broadcast-level links between songs.
Segment Selection
As well as both these technologies, the Timecodes & Cue Points API also includes our groundbreaking Segment Selection tool. This advanced AI tool finds the best three segments of a track, and this can be used by music catalogues in many different ways:
- Sharing timecodes with short-form video platforms such as TikTok
- Speeding up the music discovery process by allowing users to play from key moments in a track rather than the start
- Creating cue points for DJs to scrub through and audition different track sections quickly
"This is the next evolution in music tagging and will change the game for everyone looking for music, from TikTokers to music supervisors," says Mack Hampson, Commercial Director at Musiio by SoundCloud.
"When your life is finding music, having auto-generated cue points which will take you instantly to the part of a track you are looking for is huge. Most music catalogues start every single track at zero, and you have to manually scrub through just to get the jist of each track. When you are listening to hundreds of tracks in one session, this can be very time-consuming. Searching a catalogue with the Timecodes and Cue Point API feels like a whole new experience - because you can make decisions on a track much faster and listen to many more tracks in a single session. There are so many applications of this technology, we can't wait to see how music businesses use it to improve the music discovery experience."
This new technology arrives at a time when interest in legacy catalogue tracks is surging. Many of these tracks predate short-form video platforms by decades, and the sheer volume of content can be overwhelming for library owners to process manually. Now a new generation can rediscover timeless tracks with ease thanks to Timecodes.
To learn how the Timecodes & Cue Points API can revolutionise your music business, schedule a demo with the Musiio by SoundCloud sales team by emailing sales@musiio.com.
