Toolkits

Constraints and criteria:

• C/C++ (preferred)
• Open Source (essential)
• Works with a variety of audio formats (preferred, mp3 essential)
• The smaller the better - KISS!

Selected: Marsyas

Marsyas was chosen for this project due to its focus on audio analysis, its modular design, active development, and python bindings.

Potential Libraries/Frameworks/Toolkits

FEAPI

"Easy-to-use platform-independent plugin API for the extraction of low-level features from audio data in PCM format, as required in the context of music information retrieval software."

Vamp

"Vamp is an audio processing plugin system for plugins that extract descriptive information from audio data — typically referred to as audio analysis plugins or audio feature extraction plugins."

aubio

"aubio is a library for audio labelling. Its features include segmenting a sound file before each of its attacks, performing pitch detection, tapping the beat and producing midi streams from live audio."

Soundspotter

"Real-time audio feature extraction and similarity matching in C++. PD and Max/MSP support via FLEXT."

This guy seems to be Mac/Windows only =(

LibXtract

"libxtract is a simple, portable, lightweight library of audio feature extraction functions."

jAudio

"jAudio is a project implementing a number of common feature extraction algorithms for analyzing audio in java. Output is either in Weka's ARFF format or the ACE format. Can be used either as a GUI application, command-line application, or embedded."

Java and outdated, but could be useful for theory.

Marsyas

"Marsyas (Music Analysis, Retrieval and Synthesis for Audio Signals) is an open source software framework for audio processing with specific emphasis on Music Information Retrieval applications."

• pretty well-developed, appears to support mp3s
• depends on ALSA, might be a problem with PulseAudio?

CLAM

"CLAM is a full-fledged software framework for research and application development in the Audio and Music Domain."

• Very well documented, large and active community
• Possibly too feature-full for my needs?

MIR systems

A list of systems (from MIREX?)

Similar Programs

Mirage

"Mirage is a ready-to-try implementation of the latest research in automatic playlist generation and music similarity. Mirage analyzes your music collection and computes similarity models for each song. After your music has been analyzed, Mirage is able to automatically generate playlists of similar music."

Basically exactly what I'm trying to do for Rhythmbox. Mirage's developer's Research Group appears to be doing a lot of other cool audio processing stuff as well.

SOMeJB

A system to organize music based on similarity, with detailed descriptions and source code for algorithms.

Other Useful Stuff

MIREX

Very useful for evaluation and comparing what algorithms people have created