Re: Rhythmbox Predictive Playback - Weekly Report

["Charlotte Curtis" <c f curtis gmail com>]

Week Three was quite productive for me.  I implemented a feature
extraction algorithm using Marsyas that was very successful at last
years' music information retrieval competition.  I did switch from
Python to C++, as I saw a significant speed increase, even when
calling executables from Python code.  I had a minor setback on Friday
when I managed to overwrite my source code, but it turned out to be
not a big deal to re-write, as I had learned how the system works.

This week I will work on optimizing the code for speed.  At present, I
am extracting features for the entire song (most researchers use a
30-second segment), and on my Q6600 the process takes about 4.4
seconds per song.  My old P4 was about 2.2 times slower (based on a
test that was timed prior to old computer death and repeated on the
new computer), so I cannot expect that people will want to spend 10
seconds or more per song extracting features.  My goal is 2 seconds
(on a moderate processor, tested on my 1.1 Ghz Pentium M), and if I
can get less than that I will be happy.

That's about it for this week,

Charlotte

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 9:16 AM, Charlotte Curtis <c f curtis gmail com> wrote:
> I like how people are doing a single thread for all their reports, so
> I'm going to start doing the same.  Wish I'd thought of it last
> week...
>
> My week began fairly well - I had given myself a deadline of Friday to
> choose an audio processing library, but after building sample
> applications and messing around with a few, I decided on Tuesday that
> I really liked Marsyas.  Not only is Marsyas a library specifically
> aimed at audio analysis applications, it also has some python
> bindings, which means I might be able to do everything within a python
> plugin, provided it's fast enough.  At the very least, I can build and
> test algorithms in python, and if I need a speed increase, re-create
> it in C++.
>
> Coding became a little bit more difficult on Wednesday morning when my
> CPU overheated and refused to fire up again.  Now, I could have gone
> and found a used P4 for sale somewhere, but then I would have had to
> wait for shipping and all... and besides, it seemed like fate - I
> bought the computer in September 2003 when I began my undergrad, and
> it died just over a month after I graduated.  In any case, I live
> right down the street from (IMO) the best computer shop in Canada
> (canadacomputers.com!), so I spec'd out a new system, whipped out my
> shiny new google mastercard, and spent the day on Thursday building,
> installing, and setting up a new computer.
>
> On Friday I managed to get some more work done on my project (four
> times faster!) - I learned a little about how to use SWIG, and I added
> bindings to some datatypes of Marsyas that were missing.  The Marsyas
> devs have been very helpful thus far and I'm glad that I can
> contribute a little back to them as I work on my project.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Charlotte
>