Messages

46

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

47

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: trojan in the exe-file

« on: October 09, 2014, 14:24:37 »

I've sent a note to the Panda false-positives email address asking if they can look into this.


Chris

48

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: trojan in the exe-file

« on: October 09, 2014, 14:14:34 »

I have also re-checked with Avast, and double-checked the actual file that is provided for download at the Sonic Visualiser download page, and have continued to find nothing wrong. Builds are carried out on a virtual machine dedicated to the task, which I would have expected to be clean.

I then tested with Panda to see whether I got the same result as you, and I found that I did -- it gives me the same report for the Sonic Visualiser 2.4.1 executable. I believe it is simply mistaken, but it's not clear to me how I could prove that.


Chris

49

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: trojan in the exe-file

« on: October 09, 2014, 13:15:47 »

Hi -- That looks alarming.

I have just re-checked the binaries and the machine image on which the application was built and packaged using Microsoft's malware scanner and found no sign of anything wrong.

I'm fairly sure this must mean the alert from Panda is a false positive. The Panda database gives essentially no information about what this trojan is thought to consist of, so it's quite hard to check, but it does say it was added to the database five years ago which suggests that any other malware scanner should pick it up as well if it is genuine.

I will see whether I can learn anything else about what is going on here.

Thanks,


Chris

50

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

51

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

« on: September 24, 2014, 12:01:45 »

Just to note that v2.4 has now been released, superseding these beta builds.

You can get it from the usual download page:

http://sonicvisualiser.org/download.html


Chris

52

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

53

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

« on: September 10, 2014, 16:32:00 »

Here's the second beta release of the forthcoming v2.4. This might also be the final beta.

Once again, if you're interested in Sonic Visualiser but you're not using it for anything critical, I'd be grateful if you could download and test it! I only got a small amount of feedback from the first beta, but that was enough to allow me to fix two or three quite serious problems with it, so your reports are welcomed.

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/1168/sonic-visualiser-2.3.91.msi

OS/X disk image
http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/attachments/download/1169/Sonic%20Visualiser-2.3.91.dmg

Source code
http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/attachments/download/1170/sonic-visualiser-2.4beta2.tar.gz

(Note as before, it may identify as either v2.3.91 or v2.4beta2 -- they are the same thing)


Chris

54

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

« on: August 14, 2014, 11:40:20 »

I should have linked to the changelog:

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

Besides the feature changes, this is the first release to be built using Qt5 (rather than Qt4) on OS/X.

(The previous release had already switched to Qt5 on Windows but there were problems with it on OS/X that have only just been dealt with.)

55

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

56

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.

57

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.

58

Plugin Development / Re: Visualisation Plug-In, with Matrix Processing

« on: July 13, 2014, 14:26:56 »

Hi Jean-Louis -- that's a really good writeup on your blog there, thanks! I've added a link to it on the wiki page at https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/vamp-plugin-sdk/wiki/SampleType. You're quite right that the documentation has always been a bit weak on this subject.

Chris

59

Host Forum: Sonic Visualiser / Re: Importing Annotations

« on: May 06, 2014, 16:04:28 »

Hi there -- I'm not sure about the details of this file layout, but SV definitely should not crash when trying to import it!

Can you attach here, or send to me by email, an example annotation file? (I'm cannam at all-day-breakfast.com)


Chris

60

Plugin Development / Re: newbie erro

« on: February 10, 2014, 21:35:51 »

(The error you quoted is actually from the compile stage, not the linking stage. Did you try what I suggested, and if so, what happened?)

In answer to your most recent question, "make" is a declarative language -- instead of telling it what to do, you tell it what your targets depend on and (in theory) it works out what to do to build them. So if you write

simpleClass.o: simpleClass.cpp simpleClass.h

you are telling make that the .o file depends on the .cpp file and the .h file. That's great -- it's what you want -- but it's only a dependency, not an instruction. You also need to give make a hint that it actually needs to produce the .o file.

To do this, you'd normally add the .o file as a dependency of something somewhere else, such as the library file. There is often a variable that contains a list of the object files that need to be linked together to put together the library, and you'll want to add you new .o file to that.


Chris