JProductionCritic: An Educational Tool for Detecting Technical Errors in Audio Mixes

jProductionCritic is an open-source educational framework for automatically detecting technical recording, editing and mixing problems in audio files. It is intended to be used as a learning and proofreading tool by students and amateur producers, and can also assist teachers as a timesaving tool when grading recordings. A number of novel error detection algorithms are implemented by jProductionCritic. Problems detected include edit errors, clipping, noise infiltration, poor use of dynamics, poor track balancing, and many others. The error detection algorithms are highly configurable, in order to meet the varying aesthetics of different musical genres (e.g. Baroque vs. noise music). Effective general-purpose default settings were developed based on experiments with a variety of student pieces, and these settings were then validated using a reserved set of student pieces. jProductionCritic is also designed to serve as an extensible framework to which new detection modules can be easily plugged in. It is hoped that this will help to galvanize MIR research relating to audio production, an area that is currently underrepresented in the MIR literature, and that this work will also help to address the current general lack of educational production software.