An increasingly important branch of music information retrieval
(MIR) research deals with the extraction of musical content from
audio data, in a way that it can be used e.g. for organizing or
searching music databases. A first step towards that end is extracting
low level features from the musical audio signal that can
then serve as building blocks for constructing higher level, more
semantically meaningful properties of the music.
Many applications in the MIR field require a large number
of these features to be extracted from the audio signal. Different
applications or research projects are using very similar or identical
low level features, but they all use their own implementation of
well-known and often not algorithmically complex features. A lot
of redundant work is being done to "reinvent the wheel" each time.
Furthermore, the integration of already implemented features in a
new application is usually time-consuming even if the source code
is available, and almost impossible if this is not the case.
A plugin is considered to be a library that can be linked dynamically
at runtime with a previously defined interface. For the
host, using a plugin means to load the library and to use the exported
functions during runtime.
Benefits of FEAPI at a quick glance are:
The following documentation is automatically extracted from the source code using Doxygen:
Everything is stored on SourceForge.net under the "feapi" project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/feapi/
Download the current release from here.
The SDK contains the source of plugins to extract the following features from audio:
The FEAPI subversion repository can be accessed in two ways:
trunk/
part):
https://feapi.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/feapi/trunk/
Discussions or questions about the API, its practical use, or anything related should be held on the FEAPI mailing list or in the FEAPI forums. Both can be found on the SourceForge project page.
The following persons contributed to the project until now (listed alphabetically):
Alexander Lerch, Gunnar Eisenberg, Koen Tanghe: FEAPI: A LOW LEVEL FEATURE EXTRACTION PLUGIN API, Proc. of the 8th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx'05), Madrid, Spain, September 20-22, 2005 (Download .PDF )