What is an audio fingerprint?

An audio fingerprint is a compact digital summary of an audio signal — a short sequence of numbers that captures the acoustic characteristics of a recording in a way that is robust to common distortions like encoding changes, pitch shifts, and background noise. Unlike a cryptographic hash, an audio fingerprint is designed to match recordings of the same song even when they come from different sources, bitrates, or slight edits.

The most widely used algorithm is Chromaprint, which powers the open AcoustID database. Chromaprint converts audio into a sequence of chroma features — representations of the energy at each musical pitch class — and then compresses that into a short base64 string. This fingerprint can be submitted to the AcoustID service to identify the underlying track and retrieve metadata from MusicBrainz.

Tool description

This tool calculates the Chromaprint audio fingerprint of an uploaded audio file directly in your browser. It then optionally queries the AcoustID public database to identify the track and return metadata such as title, artist, and MusicBrainz ID — all without uploading your file to any server.

Features

  • Local processing: Audio decoding and fingerprinting run entirely in the browser using a WebAssembly build of Chromaprint — your audio file never leaves your device
  • Broad format support: Works with MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A, and any format your browser's Web Audio API can decode
  • AcoustID lookup: Optionally submits the fingerprint to the AcoustID public API to identify the song and retrieve artist/title/MusicBrainz metadata
  • Technical details: Displays sample rate, channel count, and analyzed duration alongside the fingerprint string
  • Copyable fingerprint: Copy the raw Chromaprint fingerprint string for use in external tools like fpcalc

How it works

  1. The uploaded file is decoded by the browser's Web Audio API into raw PCM samples.
  2. Up to 120 seconds of audio is fed into the Chromaprint WASM module, which computes chroma features and compresses them into a fingerprint string.
  3. If you click Look up on AcoustID, the fingerprint and duration are sent to the AcoustID public API, which returns matching recordings from the MusicBrainz database ranked by confidence score.

Supported formats

Any audio format supported by your browser's Web Audio API, which typically includes:

  • MP3 (.mp3)
  • WAV (.wav)
  • FLAC (.flac)
  • OGG Vorbis (.ogg)
  • AAC / M4A (.m4a, .aac)
  • Opus (.opus)

Limitations

  • Only the first 120 seconds of audio are analyzed (sufficient for reliable identification).
  • AcoustID identification requires the track to exist in the MusicBrainz database; rare, unreleased, or heavily remixed tracks may not return results.
  • Very short clips (under ~10 seconds) may produce fingerprints with low confidence.