Topics

16

Plugin and Host Announcements / Constant-Q library and Vamp plugin, v1.1

« on: September 09, 2015, 12:14:37 »

A new release of this Constant-Q transform library and Vamp plugin is now available:

  https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/constant-q-cpp

Most of the changes concern code organisation, for example giving the Chromagram class its own formal API in the underlying library. However, there is also a fix to label ordering in the Vamp plugin.

17

Plugin Development / Vamp Plugin Tester v1.1 released

« on: September 09, 2015, 11:32:04 »

Version 1.1 of the Vamp plugin tester, a program that loads and tests Vamp plugins for various common failure cases, is now available.

Info and downloads:

https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vamp-plugin-tester

Change log:

https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vamp-plugin-tester/repository/entry/CHANGELOG

The tester can't check whether you're getting the right results, but it can help you write more resilient and better-behaved plugins. It's a really good idea to run the tester on any new plugin before you release it.

There is some documentation in the README file, but the short version is that you run it at a command prompt with the library name and plugin name, colon-separated, as an argument:

$ ./vamp-plugin-tester vamp-example-plugins:spectralcentroid

... and see what it has to say about your plugins.

If it crashes in the middle of one of its tests, that probably means that your plugin has crashed when faced with some unexpected input. Run it in a debugger, or a memory checking utility if you have one, to find out where.

Chris

18

Host Development / Vamp Test Plugin v1.1 released

« on: September 09, 2015, 11:24:35 »

Version 1.1 of Vamp Test Plugin, the world's least interesting Vamp plugin, is now available.

Vamp Test Plugin is the equivalent of a TV test signal: it produces a set of very simple static outputs intended to help the authors of Vamp hosts check that they are handling plugin output sample types correctly. This release adds an output which is calculated from the input (to facilitate testing that input blocks are provided correctly) and a frequency-domain version of the same.

See https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vamp-test-plugin for more information.

If you are the author of a Vamp host, you might find it useful.

Chris

19

Host Development / jVamp v1.3 released

« on: September 09, 2015, 11:12:55 »

Announcing v1.3 of jVamp, a Java/JNI interface allowing the use of native-code Vamp plugins from host applications written in Java or other JVM languages.

This release simplifies the API, removing an unnecessary dispose() call and eliminating a class of native-heap memory leak.

See https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/jvamp for more details and downloads.

Chris

20

Host Development / Python Vamp host v1.0 released

« on: June 26, 2015, 12:47:19 »

This week I released v1.0 of a Python module for loading and using Vamp plugins for audio analysis.

You can find it in PyPI:

  https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vamp/

and the code project is here:

  https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vampy-host

If you'd like to try it out, I'd love to hear how you get on!

Chris

21

Plugin Development / Vamp plugin SDK v2.6 now available!

« on: June 16, 2015, 14:11:42 »

Version 2.6 of the Vamp plugin SDK is now available.

   http://www.vamp-plugins.org/

Vamp is a plugin API for audio analysis and feature extraction plugins written in C or C++.  Its SDK features an easy-to-use set of C++ classes for plugin and host developers, a reference host implementation, example plugins, and documentation.  It is supported across Linux, OS/X, and Windows.

A documentation guide to writing plugins using the Vamp SDK can be found at http://www.vamp-plugins.org/guide.pdf.

Version 2.6 is a bugfix and minor enhancement release. For more details, see the changelog at

http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vamp-plugin-sdk/repository/entry/CHANGELOG


Chris

22

Plugin and Host Announcements / Vamp Tempogram Plugin

« on: October 16, 2014, 14:21:35 »

Version 1.0 of a new Tempogram plugin is now available.

This is an implementation of the tempogram and cyclic tempogram
features described in Grosche, Müller, and Kurth 2010, providing a
robust mid-level representation that encodes local tempo information.

The plugin was written by Carl Bussey at Queen Mary University of
London, and is published under the GNU General Public License.

See https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vamp-tempogram
for downloads and more information.


Chris

23

Plugin and Host Announcements / Sonic Annotator v1.1 now available

« on: October 16, 2014, 12:44:45 »

Sonic Annotator is a utility program for batch feature extraction from audio files.  It runs Vamp audio analysis plugins with specified parameters on audio files, and writes the result features in a selection of formats.

 http://vamp-plugins.org/sonic-annotator

Version 1.1 is now available. This is a major feature release. Changes include:

Front-end changes:

 - Add support for the start time and duration properties of a transform, applying a plugin to only a range of the input audio
 - Reduce the internal processing blocksize from 16384 to 1024 samples to reduce extent of time rounding at end of file or range
 - Add --multiplex option to compose multiple audio files into a single multi-channel stream with one input file per channel
 - Add --normalise to request each audio file be normalised to 1.0 max
 - Add support for the plugin_version property of a transform, causing Sonic Annotator to refuse to run with the wrong version of a plugin
 - Add --minversion option to permit scripts to check that the version of Sonic Annotator is as they expect
 - Add new housekeeping options to list the available feature writers and supported audio file formats
 - Pull out the feature-writer-specific help text into separate help options (-h <writertype>) as the help was getting too long

Back-end (feature writer) changes:

 - Add --csv-omit-filename, --csv-end-times, and --csv-fill-ends options to the CSV feature writer to adjust various aspects of its output
 - Add "json" feature writer, exporting to JAMS (JSON Annotated Music Specification) format. This writer is provisional and is expected to change in future releases to comply more effectively with the specification
 - Add "midi" feature writer, exporting to MIDI files
 - Add "lab" feature writer, exporting to tab-separated label files. (This is equivalent to using the CSV writer with a tab separator and the new --csv-omit-filename and --csv-end-times options, but it's simpler to use if .lab is what you want)

Bug fixes:

 - Fix the former habit of forging ahead even if not all transform files could be found or parsed (this may have been intentional behaviour but it is confusing more than it is useful)
 - Fix failure to support --summary-only flag when reading transforms with summaries from a transform file


Chris

24

Plugin and Host Announcements / Sonic Visualiser v2.4.1 now available

« on: October 02, 2014, 09:43:26 »

Sonic Visualiser is an application for inspecting and analysing the
contents of music audio files. It combines powerful waveform and
spectral visualisation tools with automated feature extraction plugins
and annotation capabilities.

Version 2.4.1 of Sonic Visualiser is now available. This is a bugfix
release, fixing one serious defect that caused crashes when
rendering certain layers.

  http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

For more information, please read the change log at:

 http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-visualiser/repository/entry/CHANGELOG


Chris

25

Plugin and Host Announcements / Sonic Visualiser v2.4 now available

« on: September 24, 2014, 11:57:32 »

Sonic Visualiser is an application for inspecting and analysing the
contents of music audio files. It combines powerful waveform and
spectral visualisation tools with automated feature extraction plugins
and annotation capabilities.

Version 2.4 of Sonic Visualiser is now available. This release contains
some interesting new features, perhaps most noteworthy the ability to
sonify (play back) continuous frequency curve layers.

  http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

For more information, please read the change log at:

 http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-visualiser/repository/entry/CHANGELOG


Chris

26

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Sonic Visualiser v2.4 - beta-test release

« on: August 14, 2014, 11:27:49 »

Hi all -- I've just packaged up a beta-test release of the next version of Sonic Visualiser (which will be v2.4).

If you are interested in Sonic Visualiser but you're not using it for anything critical (so you don't care if it breaks) -- and if you're happy to provide feedback about any problems you have -- then I'd be grateful if you could download and test it!

Currently there are pre-built packages for Windows and OS/X plus a source code package.

Download links are:

Windows installer
http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/attachments/download/1144/sonic-visualiser-2.3.90.msi

OS/X disk image
http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/attachments/download/1143/Sonic%20Visualiser-2.3.90.dmg

Source code
http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/attachments/download/1145/sonic-visualiser-2.4beta1.tar.gz

(Note, it may identify as either v2.3.90 or v2.4beta1 -- they are the same thing)

The actual 2.4 release is likely to follow some time in September.


Chris

27

Plugin and Host Announcements / Silvet Note Transcription plugin v1.0 released

« on: August 09, 2014, 13:38:21 »

Silvet is a Vamp plugin for note transcription in polyphonic music.

   http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/silvet

Silvet listens to audio recordings of music and tries to work out what notes are being played. It uses the method described in "A Shift-Invariant Latent Variable Model for Automatic Music Transcription" by Emmanouil Benetos and Simon Dixon (Computer Music Journal, 2012).

The plugin is provided with source code under the GNU General Public License, and with binaries for Windows, OS/X and Linux.

How good is it?

Silvet performs well for some recordings, but the range of music that works well is quite limited at this stage. Generally it works best with piano or acoustic instruments in solo or small-ensemble music.

Silvet does not transcribe percussion and has a limited range of instrument support. It does not technically support vocals, although it will sometimes transcribe them anyway.

You can usually expect the output to be reasonably informative and to bear some audible relationship to the actual notes, but you shouldn't expect to get something that can be directly converted to a readable score. For much rock/pop music in particular the results will be, at best, recognisable.

To summarise: try it and see.

28

Plugin and Host Announcements / Constant-Q library and Vamp plugin

« on: August 09, 2014, 13:34:32 »

Announcing a new C++ library and Vamp plugin implementing the Constant-Q transform of a time-domain signal.

    https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/constant-q-cpp

The Constant-Q transform is a time-to-frequency-domain transform related to the short-time Fourier transform, but with output bins spaced logarithmically in frequency, rather than linearly. The output bins are therefore linearly spaced in terms of musical pitch. The Constant-Q is useful as a preliminary transform in various other methods such as note transcription and key estimation techniques.

This library provides:

 * Forward transform: time-domain to complex Constant-Q bins
 * Forward spectrogram: time-domain to interpolated Constant-Q magnitude spectrogram
 * Inverse transform: complex Constant-Q bins to time domain

The Vamp plugin provides:

 * Constant-Q magnitude spectrogram with high and low frequency extents defined in Hz
 * Constant-Q magnitude spectrogram with high and low frequency extents defined as MIDI pitch values
 * Pitch chromagram obtained by folding a Constant-Q spectrogram around into a single-octave range

The code is provided with full source under a liberal licence, and plugin binaries are provided for Windows, OS/X, and Linux.

The method is drawn from Christian Schörkhuber and Anssi Klapuri, "Constant-Q transform toolbox for music processing", SMC 2010. See the file CITATION for details. If you use this code in research work, please cite this paper.

29

Plugin and Host Announcements / Sonic Visualiser v2.3 now available

« on: December 13, 2013, 15:06:26 »

Sonic Visualiser is an application for inspecting and analysing the
contents of music audio files. It combines powerful waveform and
spectral visualisation tools with automated feature extraction plugins
and annotation capabilities.

Version 2.3 of Sonic Visualiser is now available. This release contains
bugfixes and a small number of new features.

  http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

For more information, please read the change log at:

 http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-visualiser/repository/entry/CHANGELOG


Chris

30

Plugin and Host Announcements / Sonic Visualiser v2.2 now available

« on: August 01, 2013, 09:59:00 »

Sonic Visualiser is an application for inspecting and analysing the
contents of music audio files. It combines powerful waveform and
spectral visualisation tools with automated feature extraction plugins
and annotation capabilities.

Version 2.2 of Sonic Visualiser is now available. This is a bugfix release.

 http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

For more information, please read the change log at:

 http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-visualiser/repository/entry/CHANGELOG


Chris