Recording or playback apparatus and musical piece detecting apparatus

An apparatus implementing at least recording or playback that detects a music section from an audio signal, comprising:

• a cut point detector that detects a time point as a cut point where a level of an audio signal or an amount of change in the audio signal level is equal to or more than a predetermined value;
• a frequency characteristic calculator that calculates a characteristic in a frequency domain of the audio signal only at each cut point;
• a music section detector that detects a start point and an end point of a music section;
• and
• an attribute determining unit that determines whether the audio signal at each cut point belongs to a music section or to a non-music section on a basis of the characteristic calculated by the frequency characteristic calculator;
• wherein
• the music section detector presumes that the audio signal between non-music section is a music section, when a time interval between two neighboring non-music section is not shorter than a predetermined length of time.