An Evaluation of Audio Feature Extraction Toolboxes

Audio feature extraction underpins a massive proportion of audio processing, music information retrieval, audio effect design and audio synthesis. Design, analysis, synthesis and evaluation often rely on audio features, but there are a large and diverse range of feature extraction tools presented to the community. An evaluation of existing audio feature extraction libraries was undertaken. Ten libraries and toolboxes were evaluated with the Cranfield Model for evaluation of information retrieval systems, reviewing the coverage, effort, presentation and time lag of a system. Comparisons are undertaken of these tools and example use cases are presented as to when toolboxes are most suitable. This paper allows a software engineer or researcher to quickly and easily select a suitable audio feature extraction toolbox.

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