Watermarking audio

Question

Level 2

209 points

Watermarking audio

AFAIK music is copyrighted as soon as someone puts pen to paper, so to speak, but there's also the question of proving ownership, of which watermarking is one way. Do you watermark your audio? If so which methods do you use? I'm wondering if Logic has something similar to FL Studio's Harmor image resynthesis method, which seems easy to implement and relatively unnoticeable, although by default would probably only cover a portion of a track. Anyone heard of / try SSW (spread spectrum watermarking) - seems to be very secure and undetectable to the listener? If you don't watermark your music, do you do anything else to protect it or do you think it's pointless?

Posted on Sep 11, 2016 4:47 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Sep 11, 2016 5:00 AM in response to Connor Hawke

It's not something I've tried, but quite some years ago the record companies were getting very enthusiastic about this concept - however in the end it was abandoned because it simply didn't work. Either it was audible or it had no useful effect. This was in analogue days: I don't know what you might do with a digital file but basically if it can be played it can be analogue copied. The only practicable solution seems to be DRM - Digital Rights Management - as used to be in place in the iTunes Store, but I don't know how a personal user would go about implementing this.

Reply

Answer 2

Connor Hawke Author

Level 2

209 points

Sep 11, 2016 5:24 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Analogue-copying can be a legitimate concern. Nonetheless it seems possible for some digital watermarking techniques to survive high degrees of distortion. There are, for example, third-party solutions that reportedly offer secure, undetectable and robust solutions (e.g. AWT2), although it might be better to not rely on these if similar methods can be achieved through currently owned tools.

Reply