Messages

151

Getting and Using Vamp Plugins / Re: Match to output two synchronized files

« on: September 25, 2009, 16:22:16 »

The short answer, I'm afraid, is "no".

Sonic Visualiser allows you to change the playback speed yourself while playing a file, and can use the MATCH plugin to calculate alignments between files, but it doesn't have any capability to stretch one file to align with the other one during playback -- it simply plays file one or the other on its own, and when you switch the current file, it uses the alignment to switch to the "right" place.

I'm afraid I don't have any good suggestion to hand of a piece of software that might do this.  It's technically possible, and there is sure to be something out there that does it... but I don't know what.  I don't think it would make a simple extension to Sonic Visualiser, for various "architectural" reasons.


Chris

152

Plugin Development / Vamp Plugin Tester v1.0 released

« on: September 25, 2009, 16:15:48 »

Version 1.0 of the Vamp plugin tester, a simple program that loads and tests Vamp plugins for various common failure cases, is now available.  This is the second release, and the first "non-experimental" one.

The tester can't check whether you're getting the right results, but it can help you write more resilient and better-behaved plugins.

Source code:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vamp/vamp-plugin-tester-1.0.tar.gz

OS/X universal binary:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vamp/vamp-plugin-tester-1.0-osx-universal.tar.gz

Windows binary:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vamp/vamp-plugin-tester-1.0-win32.zip

Linux 32-bit binary:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vamp/vamp-plugin-tester-1.0-i686-linux.tar.gz

Linux 64-bit binary:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vamp/vamp-plugin-tester-1.0-amd64-linux.tar.gz

Solaris 32-bit x86 binary:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vamp/vamp-plugin-tester-1.0-i686-solaris.tar.gz

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.  It may also crash; if it crashes in the middle of one of its tests, that usually 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

153

Plugin Development / Vamp plugin SDK v2.1 now available

« on: September 25, 2009, 16:12:23 »

Vamp SDK version 2.1 is now available

Version 2.1 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, Windows, and Solaris/x86.

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

Version 2.1 is a maintenance release which contains a number of bug fixes and a new set of skeleton source code files for use by plugin developers.  All of the fixes are relevant to host code only: there is no need to recompile or re-link any plugins that have been linked with 2.0 against the new release.

Credits

This work was carried out at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London.  It was funded by the EPSRC through the OMRAS2 project EP/E017614/1.  See http://omras2.org/ for more information.


Chris

154

Plugin and Host Announcements / Vamp plugin SDK v2.1 released

« on: September 25, 2009, 16:11:18 »

Vamp SDK version 2.1 is now available

Version 2.1 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, Windows, and Solaris/x86.

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

Version 2.1 is a maintenance release which contains a number of bug fixes and a new set of skeleton source code files for use by plugin developers.  All of the fixes are relevant to host code only: there is no need to recompile or re-link any plugins that have been linked with 2.0 against the new release.

Credits

This work was carried out at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London.  It was funded by the EPSRC through the OMRAS2 project EP/E017614/1.  See http://omras2.org/ for more information.


Chris

155

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: A small change that would greatly help an animator.

« on: September 25, 2009, 14:12:42 »

Kyler,

Seemed like a simple idea, so I've added something to this effect which will be in the next release (coming during the next couple of days).


Chris

156

Plugin and Host Announcements / Re: QM Vamp Plugins v1.6 now available

« on: September 14, 2009, 14:22:21 »

How long is the audio file?  If it's very short, then it's possible that there may be an off-by-one error or some such in the counter used for progress display, that is not usually noticeable but becomes visible when the file is so short as to need only 10 or so processing blocks.

The QM tempo tracker plugin I think needs a certain amount of data before it will even attempt to calculate a value -- a few seconds, anyway (I'm not sure of the exact amount) -- so this would probably also explain why there seems to be no result.  Of course, any tempo estimator by definition needs a certain period of time to work from!  You may find that the simple tempo estimator plugin in the example plugin set will work with shorter files than the QM plugin.


Chris

157

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: Audio To MIDI Conversion

« on: August 26, 2009, 17:15:51 »

Well, it's already possible to do audio-to-MIDI in Sonic Visualiser: just use a Vamp plugin.

There are currently two plugins that can be used for this -- the Aubio Notes plugin, and the Transcription plugin in the QM plugin set.  They're very dependent on the source material, but they can work well for some types of music (this is one reason I wouldn't really want to try to build this sort of function in to the host).  Run one of these plugins in Sonic Visualiser and you should get a new Note layer as output, which you can then export as MIDI.

This would also be a very obvious way to do audio-to-MIDI in Audacity; you can already run these plugins there, it's just that the program lacks (so far) the ability to present the result data as a note track.  Any developer seriously considering writing new audio-to-MIDI code would be very well advised to at least consider doing so as a Vamp plugin.


Chris

158

Plugin Development / Re: Compiling/Installing vamp on Mac OSX 10.5

« on: August 26, 2009, 17:09:10 »

I'm afraid there is no OS/X install target for the SDK.  To be honest, when I'm using it on OS/X I generally don't install at all, just add the SDK include paths into my build project much as you described trying to do with Marsyas.  (What went wrong when you tried that?)


Chris

159

Plugin Development / Re: coding...

« on: August 17, 2009, 16:27:58 »

At first glance, that looks like an error in the destructor -- perhaps calling del_fvec on something that has never been allocated.  Are you sure that everything you are deleting or deallocating in the destructor was in fact allocated properly in the constructor?


Chris

160

Host Development / Re: listen to audio output / audio input

« on: July 16, 2009, 15:44:45 »

Your host can use the PluginInputDomainAdapter to avoid having to perform FFTs itself.  If you load plugins using a PluginLoader with the ADAPT_ALL_SAFE or ADAPT_ALL flag set, the PluginLoader will wrap your plugin in a PluginInputDomainAdapter for you and you will be able to safely send time-domain data to every plugin.

See the online API docs at http://vamp-plugins.org/code-doc/index.html for more about these loaders and adapters.

The Vamp SDK builds fine under Windows; if you're using Visual Studio, there are project files included in the build/ directory.  For MinGW you'll have to run the gauntlet of "configure" and adjust the results to suit.

You should probably also read this thread: http://vamp-plugins.org/forum/index.php/topic,34.0.html


Chris

161

Plugin Development / Re: coding...

« on: July 16, 2009, 15:40:12 »

Well, I think that just means it crashed!  Is there no stack trace offered?  It's usually available in the information pane at the bottom right of the Visual Studio debugger window.


Chris

162

Plugin and Host Announcements / QM Vamp Plugins v1.6 now available

« on: July 16, 2009, 15:38:12 »

Version 1.6 of the QM Vamp Plugins -- a set of audio analysis plugins in the
Vamp plugin format, developed at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary,
University of London -- is now available for download.

Plugins included are note onset detector, beat and barline tracker, tempo
estimator, key estimator, tonal change detector, structural segmenter, timbral
and rhythmic similarity, wavelet scaleogram, adaptive spectrogram, note
transcription, chromagram, constant-Q spectrogram, and MFCC calculation.

This is a major feature release which adds four new plugins (adaptive
spectrogram, polyphonic transcription, wavelet scalogram, and
bar-and-beat tracker) and a new method for the beat tracker.

For downloads, please see:

 http://isophonics.net/QMVampPlugins

The plugins are available in binary form only and may be freely used for any
purpose, and redistributed for non-commercial purposes only.  Supported
platforms are 32- and 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows, and OS/X 10.4 or newer
(Intel/PPC universal).

For documentation of these plugins, please see:

 http://www.vamp-plugins.org/plugin-doc/qm-vamp-plugins.html


Chris

163

Plugin Development / Re: coding...

« on: July 09, 2009, 16:01:39 »

If you run SV by configuring Visual Studio to run it as its debug command and then using the "Start Debugging" option in Visual Studio, it should run SV as normal, but when it crashes, it should show you a stack trace (in the debug frame which I think should be at bottom-right of the main window normally in Visual Studio).  Does it not do that?

It might not turn out to be meaningful, but it's possible that it might be.


Chris

164

Plugin and Host Announcements / Sonic Visualiser v1.6 now available!

« on: July 06, 2009, 14:49:46 »

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 1.6 of Sonic Visualiser is now available.

  http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

This is a bugfix release.  For details, please read the release notes at:

  https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=695075

Sonic Visualiser contains advanced waveform and spectrogram viewers,
as well as editors for many sorts of audio annotations. Besides
visualisation, it can make and play selections based on the locations
of automatically detected features, seamlessly loop playback of single
or multiple noncontiguous regions, synthesise annotations for
playback, slow down playback while retaining display synchronisation,
and show the ongoing alignment in time between multiple recordings of
a piece with different timings.

Sonic Visualiser supports the Vamp plugin API for plugins that extract
descriptive or analytical data from audio.  Vamp plugins for onset,
pitch and note detection, tempo tracking, chromagram analysis,
constant-Q spectrogram, spectral centroid, power curve, key
estimation, tonal change detection, harmonic spectrogram, adaptive
multi-resolution spectrogram, structural segmentation, note
transcription, wavelet scaleogram, timbral similarity, audio alignment
calculation and a large number of low-level spectral features are
available.  There is also a comprehensive SDK for use by developers
of Vamp plugins and hosts.  For more information about Vamp plugins,
please see:

  http://www.vamp-plugins.org/

Sonic Visualiser was developed at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen
Mary, University of London:

  http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/

Ongoing work on Sonic Visualiser and audio feature representation in
the semantic web is carried out as part of the OMRAS2 project funded
by the EPSRC.  See

  http://omras2.org/

for more information.

Sonic Visualiser is Free Software distributed under the GNU General
Public License.  The 1.6 release is available now as binaries for Linux,
OS/X, and Windows, and in source code form.


Chris

165

Plugin Development / Re: coding...

« on: July 06, 2009, 12:46:41 »

Well, when SV starts up it does the following in order to build up its plugin menu:

 -- opens the plugin DLL
 -- calls vampGetPluginDescriptor repeatedly, with values starting at 0 and increasing by 1, until vampGetPluginDescriptor returns a NULL (or zero) value
 -- constructs each plugin whose descriptor was returned, calls getOutputDescriptors() on it, then destroys it again

This suggests various places where troubles could arise:

 -- the plugin's constructor?
 -- the getOutputDescriptors function?
 -- the destructor?

Note that initialise() and process() are not called on startup, so this crash shouldn't be in either of those.

It's also possible to run into problems if, for example, you compile the plugin using one version of the Vamp plugin SDK and link (perhaps dynamically) with a different version.  Make sure you're using version 2.0 of the SDK libraries and headers.

Can you try running SV in your IDE's debugger? -- for example in Visual Studio you can configure the Debug command to run a particular executable instead of the thing you were just compiling, so you could tell it to run the Sonic Visualiser executable (e.g. in VS2008 Project -> Properties -> Configuration Properties -> Debugging -> Executable).  Hopefully you should get a workable stack trace when it crashes.


Chris