Recent Posts

71

Plugin Development / Sonic Annotator 0.7 (needed for Mac to use Marsyas Plugin) not installing

« Last post by Apfelmatsch on July 21, 2015, 16:14:10 »

Hello,

I am not sure, if I am allowed to post here and this Subforum is meant for any sort of technical support, but:

the notes to "Marsyas Vamp Plugins" say that it is not available for Macs, but it can be used with Sonic annotator 0.7 for Macs.

I downloaded both the 32bit and the 64bit version and can't install or open it, when I open it I get a Terminal window with the last line "abborted" (well its German here, but that's what it says in translation).

What am I supposed to do with the unix-file in the tar.gz archive?

Also, for the not so technically minded, it might be nice to add, that the Marsyas page links to the 32bit version for Macs, while there is a 64bit version available via navigating from the Vamp-plugins.org/download.html page to all available downloads of the certain Plugin.

My system: Mac OS X 10.9

72

Getting and Using Vamp Plugins / Which to prefer for finding Tempo: Tempogram or Beatroot plugin?

« Last post by Apfelmatsch on July 21, 2015, 00:02:20 »

If I want to know in what tempo several parts of a piece of music are played, what should I use.

In the musicologist's guide to Sonic Visualizer they speak of either tapping by ones own or using Spectrograms. I suppose they are talking about the "Chronogram" feature in Mazurka Plugin, which is not supported on Macs, right?

73

Getting and Using Vamp Plugins / Re: Mazurka Plugins for Mac

« Last post by Apfelmatsch on July 20, 2015, 23:55:15 »

I have this question, too.

Or is there maybe another Plugin that is similar?

74

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Is digitalized analogue material a problem for Sonicvisualizer?

« Last post by Apfelmatsch on July 06, 2015, 23:23:31 »

Hi,

(1.) someone told me, if I use analysis software (in general) that it doesn't work with analogue sources (i.e. studio/live recordings that maybe were first released on LP and then later for CD). I mean I can imagine, that it would interpret "noise" (hizzing?) as music and give wrong results...
but, if there is little noise in the recording they made the digitalized CD version of, would that be usable?

(2.) What parameters would be affected by analogue sources and what not?
(3.) I guess tempo will not be a problem, if there are no cracks that could be misinterpreted as beats in the recording, right?
(4.) Analysing the pitch could be a problem, right?
(5.) Dynamics would be a problem, right?

My questions are in regard to classical music (a Symphony).

I added numbers, so people can answer easier, if they don't want to quote.

75

Host Development / Python Vamp host v1.0 released

« Last post by cannam 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

76

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

« Last post by cannam 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

77

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: What Plugins are needed to compare diffr. musical interpretations of a Symphony

« Last post by Apfelmatsch on April 29, 2015, 14:25:12 »

Thank you Chris! That was very thoughtful and will have a look into it. Yet I will have to decide how much time I will preserve for testing the tools as such vs actually starting to compare the different interpretations.

The text link is great! Thanks!

78

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: MP3 or WAV different result?

« Last post by Apfelmatsch on April 29, 2015, 14:21:32 »

Thank you for answering!

OK, the pdf you linked does sugguest (as you somewhat gave a hint to) that a minimum of aprox. 160kbps is needed to not affect the research results.

I am still a bit insecure, though. There seems to be a special case: http://www.pleasurizemusic.com/en/why-do-data-compression-processes-mp3-example-strongly-affect-loud-masters-no-headroom What is described here, is that different from the loudness war phenomenon (which will not play a role here)? If the studio master has already been made very loud, it will get problematic after compression. So let's say from the tape, they made an audio CD setting the loudest point as high as possible or even upping the most silent points of the tape. I guess when the MP3 seller / the label then compressed that to mp3 you get a similar phenomenon like in loudness war (I guess that was what you were referencing to radio broadcast situations etc.).

Well, ok. I can never know, what the studio guy did to the tape. When the conductor conducted from pianossimo to fortissimo and the studio guy just equalized that, I can't do anything about it. I probably won't even know, if he did change the conductors intents.

Apart from that is the loudness war stuff been done to classical music, too? Maybe in a false attempt to make it more impressive to the listener?

Another thought: according to the pdf, in my tests, could I go so far and even compare 256kbps mp3s (as I guess that is the most likely to be found) or 320kbps mp3s with FLAC/ALAC and wav/aiff? Like conductor 1 as MP3 and conductor 2 as wav (which would be derived from FLAC) and compare them?

Maybe I should even compare mp3s of the same conductor and same recording against each other, maybe I find that different mp3 sellers used different quality compressors (given that all use 256mbps).

Since I have a Mac and Sonicvisualizer does only take wav I will also have to look out for something that can convert FLAC (PC) to wav and ALAC (Mac) to wav and maybe even aiff (Mac) to wav (PC).

79

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: What Plugins are needed to compare diffr. musical interpretations of a Symphony

« Last post by cannam on April 27, 2015, 08:47:42 »

Hi -- this is a good general question but it is also a rather difficult high-level question, and one might need quite a bit of experience in real musicological work to be able to answer.

While Sonic Visualiser and the available plugins provide some tools for breaking down music in interpretable ways, it is still very hard to work backwards from a recording to details of things like instrumental balance or local dynamic or tempo variation in a classical work, not least because most methods are primarily designed for pop/rock music. (Even local tempo estimation and "beat tracking" are essentially unsolved problems for classical music.)

One thing that is quite valuable is to load multiple recordings into Sonic Visualiser and then time-align them -- for this you need the MATCH plugin installed. This can give you some information about the conductor's decisions in terms of both overall and local tempo. There is a video showing this at http://sonicvisualiser.org/videos.html#2 (Audio alignment using Sonic Visualiser and MATCH).

The videos from Musicology for the Masses may also be of interest, as well as "A musicologist's guide to Sonic Visualiser" (http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/analysing/p9_1.html), but (as you have probably seen already) these primarily focus on Sonic Visualiser's built-in visualisation tools rather than higher-level analysis using Vamp plugins.

It's quite possible you may get interesting results from plugins that analyse tonality (possibly even the "Key Strength Plot" from the very basic key estimator in the QM Vamp Plugins set) or loudness (there are various options for analysing amplitude -- we have a proper auditory-model loudness plugin in the works but it isn't quite published yet).

Chris

80

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: MP3 or WAV different result?

« Last post by cannam on April 24, 2015, 14:17:54 »

Hi there -- please don't worry about asking stupid questions, this is a very reasonable one.

Generally speaking the compression used for mp3s does not make a difference to dynamics and the like -- it has nothing in common with the dynamic range compression typically used for e.g. radio broadcast. A good-quality mp3 should give you essentially the same results as the wav version for reasonably robust audio features, although you may get different results for very low-level features (such as those sensitive to inaudibly high frequencies appearing in the signal).

There have been various publications on this subject, for example here: http://www.terasoft.com.tw/conf/ismir2014/proceedings/T103_326_Paper.pdf

Do be alert, though, to the fact that there may be padding differences between different encodings or releases of the same piece (i.e. different amounts of silence at end or beginning).

Chris