A system for monitoring and recognizing audio broadcasts is described. The system includes a plurality of geographically distributed monitoring stations, each of the monitoring stations receiving unknown audio data from a plurality of audio broadcasts. A recognition system receives the unknown audio data from the plurality of monitoring stations and compares the unknown audio data against a database of signature files. The database of signature files, or index sets, corresponds to a library of known audio files, such that the recognition system is able to identify known audio files in the unknown audio stream as a result of the comparison. The system further includes a nervous system able to monitor and configure the plurality of monitoring stations and the recognition system, and a heuristics and reporting system able to analyze the results of the comparison performed by the recognition system and use metadata associated with each of the known audio files to generate a report of the contents of plurality of audio broadcasts.