electronic music similarity search engine

It compares the audio. Every track goes through discogs-effnet, an audio model from Essentia. It was trained on 3.3 million tracks to recognise 400 Discogs styles from 2-second slices of audio. For each track it outputs a 1,280-dimension embedding, a vector that describes how the track sounds. Many Discogs styles, like Italo disco or UK garage, belong to a time and place, so records from the same scene tend to sit close together. The details are in the paper behind the model.

When you paste a link, your track goes through the same model. cosine.club then runs a vector search over the catalog for the tracks whose embeddings are closest to it, and lists them closest first. The measure is cosine similarity, which scores how closely two vectors point in the same direction.

Sometimes. Shazam uses audio fingerprinting: it matches peaks in the spectrogram of one exact recording, so it works through club noise and a phone mic. cosine.club compares overall sound instead, so a phone recording from a club rarely finds the original. The crowd and the room change the sound too much.

A clean rip works much better. Upload it to Vocaroo and paste the link. If the track is in the catalog, it often comes up first. If not, you may still get its label mates or records from the same year and scene, which can be enough to find it.

It's free, and you can search and find similar tracks without an account. An account saves your playlists, favorites and history, and gives you an API key. There's no paid tier.

To help pay the hosting costs, you can become a supporter.

YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, Beatport, Discogs, Apple Music and Vocaroo. Paste one and you get tracks that sound like it. Spotify and SoundCloud links must point to a single track, not a playlist or profile.

Tidal and Deezer don't work yet. If there's a service you want, email me.

Over two million tracks, mostly electronic and underground music: house, techno, UK garage, jungle, drum & bass, breakbeat, electro, ambient, dub, funk, soul, disco and more.

I focus on underground records rather than mainstream releases. Think a UK funky 12-inch pressed in a run of 300.