Essentia

Essentia is an open-source C++ library for audio analysis and audio-based music information retrieval released under the Affero GPL license. It contains an extensive collection of reusable algorithms which implement audio input/output functionality, standard digital signal processing blocks, statistical characterization of data, and a large set of spectral, temporal, tonal and high-level music descriptors. The library is also wrapped in Python and includes a number of predefined executable extractors for the available music descriptors, which facilitates its use for fast prototyping and allows setting up research experiments very rapidly. Furthermore, it includes a Vamp plugin to be used with Sonic Visualiser for visualization purposes. The library is cross-platform and currently supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Essentia is designed with a focus on the robustness of the provided music descriptors and is optimized in terms of the computational cost of the algorithms. The provided functionality, specifically the music descriptors included in-the-box and signal processing algorithms, is easily expandable and allows for both research experiments and development of large-scale industrial applications.

Documentation online: http://essentia.upf.edu/

Installation

Read installation instructions:

• online at http://essentia.upf.edu/documentation/installing.html

• in doc/sphinxdoc/installing.rst file in the code.

Essentia does compile and run correctly on Windows, however there is no Visual Studio project readily available, so you will have to setup one yourself and compile the dependencies too. We will be working on Windows installer in the near future.

Quick start

Quick start using python: http://essentia.upf.edu/documentation/python_tutorial.html

Versions

Official releases:

• https://github.com/MTG/essentia/releases

Github branches:

• 2.0: minor bugfixes/improvements following the official release.

  These fixes should not affect algorithms' results, you may be assured in the identity of the results generated by example feature extractors, i.e. computed descriptors will be compatible with the official 2.0 release.

• 2.0.1: the same as 2.0 plus enabled high-level classifier models.

• master: development branch for major improvements, code refactoring, new algorithms, fixes that break descriptor compatibility between versions.

If you use example extractors (located in src/examples), or your own code employing Essentia algorithms to compute descriptors, you should be aware of possible incompatibilities when using different versions of Essentia.