PlayCert · Engine v5

Music identification
infrastructure for the
copyright collection era.

A production-grade engine combining multi-resolution acoustic fingerprinting (TCBC), master watermark embed (WavMark 16-bit), and a self-owned audit blockchain (PlayCert Ledger) into one identification pipeline. Designed at national-catalogue scale.

Explore the API View live status (/healthz)
Korean technology for Asian CMOs First customer: a collective management organisation in Thailand (letter of intent signed)
GET /healthz → probing… checking
—
Registered masters · live catalogue (2026-08-24)
—
Preview index · 30s clip per track (2026-07-22)
—
PlayCert Ledger blocks
TCBC
Identification backbone
Identification stack

Four orthogonal defenses,
tuned for an Asian catalogue.

The engine is not a single algorithm but a defense-in-depth pipeline. Each layer covers attack vectors the others cannot — pitch shift, broadcast EQ, and tampered uploads — producing an identification verdict that holds across mp3, radio, and short clip evidence.

TCBC fingerprint

Multi-resolution FFT with subband cross-band correlation and chroma-derived hashing. Designed to survive radio EQ, pitch shift and MP3 distortion; on real radio broadcast segments, 0 false positives in 636 pairs matched against a wrong track (geometric re-check, June–August 2026).

TCBC
Multi-resolution FFT + chroma
500,012
Preview index — 30s clips, not full-track coverage

Master watermark

WavMark (16-bit, 16 kHz) is embedded into the master. Read-back and higher-capacity watermarking will be applied in the next stage, designed so that proof of origin survives cropping, transcoding and short excerpts.

WavMark
16-bit @ 16 kHz
Next stage
Higher-capacity watermark

PlayCert Ledger audit

Self-owned HMAC-signed hash chain with Merkle batch proofs and CID prefix index. No external L1 fees. IPFS integration is designed, not yet validated. Every ingest, identify, monitoring and settlement event is sealed.

—
Live blocks
5 types
genesis · ingest · identify · monitor · settle

HRTD cover detection (planned)

Harmonic-rhythmic temporal descriptor for cross-version retrieval. A K‑pop original–cover pair test is planned. Not yet connected to the identification path, because broadcast monitoring targets original masters rather than covers; connection will be reviewed after the K‑pop test.

K-pop
Original–cover pair test planned
Ingest
Stored at registration

FCW provenance stamp

Self-owned QIM watermark for clean-path tamper-evidence. A fast cryptographic stamp, complementary to attack-robust layers.

FCW
Fragile clean-watermark
QIM
Quantization-index modulation

Stream supervisor

Always-on workers for HLS broadcast, YouTube ingest, and Spotify discovery. Each match flows directly into the chain and the settlement queue.

gunicorn
Production WSGI
Linux
Production runtime
Public surface

A focused API.
Four endpoints provide health checks, stats, identification and registration.

Authentication is a single X-API-Key header. Health is open so societies can verify uptime without credentials. Uploads cap at 50 MB. Every response carries an x-request-id for PlayCert Ledger trace.

GET /healthz Public

Liveness and chain integrity probe. No authentication required.

// Live response from this server 
// loading…
GET /v5/stats X-API-Key

Store, acoustic feature vectors (in preparation), audit chain counters — one snapshot for monitoring dashboards.

curl https://playcert.net/v5/stats \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PLAYCERT_API_KEY"

// returns
{
{ "store": { "tracks": <int>, "tcbc_hashes": <int> },
  "neural_store": { "vectors": <int>, "dimension": <int> },
  "rtam": { "history_rows": <int> },
  "audit": { "blocks": <int>, "chain_valid": <bool> }
}
POST /v5/identify X-API-Key

Run the full identification pipeline on an uploaded query — TCBC + chain seal.

curl -X POST https://playcert.net/v5/identify \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PLAYCERT_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@query.mp3"

// returns
{
  "verdict": <str>,
  "work_id": <str>,
  "confidence": <float>,
  "tcbc": { "top1": <str> },
  "watermark": { "detected": <bool>, "bit_acc": <float> },
  "chain_block": <int>
}
POST /v5/ingest X-API-Key

Register a track. Fingerprint, watermark, and PlayCert Ledger ingest block in one call.

curl -X POST https://playcert.net/v5/ingest \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PLAYCERT_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@master.wav" \
  -F "work_id=W0050" \
  -F "title=Track Title" \
  -F "artist=Artist"
Operational stack

Built on what production trusts.

A self-hosted stack with no external L1 fees, operated by the same team that built the engine.

Python 3.10+ · FastAPI

FastAPI factory pattern, uvicorn worker, systemd-managed restart. Single ExecStart, four endpoints.

PyTorch CPU + Numba JIT

Watermark and identification work on CPU only. No GPU lock-in, no driver dance, no hidden cost line.

FAISS IVFPQ · SQLite

The 10M-track ANN migration is designed; building and validating the 10M-scale index is the next stage. Storage scales linearly with the catalogue.

nginx · Let's Encrypt

TLS 1.3, HSTS-ready, Certbot-renewed. Reverse proxy on the same VPC as the engine.

PlayCert Ledger

Self-owned audit blockchain. IPFS integration is designed and not yet validated -- no pin has been performed on this host. No external transaction fees.

HMAC · X-API-Key

Application-layer auth on every protected endpoint. nginx adds TLS. Two-layer defense, zero shared secrets in code.

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