Advanced ABX, New cross-platform ABX application Options

[googlebot]

Advanced ABX

No currently available ABX application is able to switch without audible transients between tracks. The resulting clicks and pops can both increase the number of false positive and false negative results. The former happens, when the type of clicking correlates to the type of switch: A/A or A/B. False negatives become more probable, when loud clicks desensitize your hearing or keep you from turning up the volume to more revealing listening levels.

Advanced ABX provides transient-free switching!


Other exclusive features:

• Impedes "fishing" for good results by design by enforcing a chosen number of rounds.
• Customizable transition length to adapt to different material, for example in- and out-of-phase audio data.
• Easily extendable transition mechanism: A very simple API allows scientists and developers to drop-in their own custom transition modules, for example to allow completely seamless switching.

Non-exclusive features:

• Computation of statistical significance (p-value), also known as "probability of guessing".
• Multi-threaded, low resource consumption.
• Cross platform Java binary. Custom Windows and Mac executables.
• Nice and simplistic GUI.
• Textual output for easy publication of results.

Screenshot:



Notes:

I could only test on a Mac, yet, where it works flawlessly. Please report wether it also works on other platforms. Input is currently WAV only, and the files must have identical format and length. The program is basically able to work with all PCM integer bit depths up to 32 bit, but in practice one is limited by ones specific JRE's capabilities. Java on the Mac, for example, is limited to 16 bit. High sample rates should not be a problem anywhere. The back-end already supports looping, it just isn't implemented in the GUI code, yet.

The source code is going to be released later on. Please don't drown me in feature requests, actual code submits are much preferred.

Download:

Go here.

This post has been edited by googlebot: May 1 2010, 21:53

[Alex B]

googlebot,

First I would like to thank you for your work.

You seem to pretty hastily think that no one is interested about the inventions you have made. You released this project only a month ago. Surely a developer may be interested to use your source code when the time is right. That may happen tomorrow, next month, next year... (of course "never" is also possible). I am not a developer, but I had a very busy and exhausting last month and I didn't have any time/inspiration/strength for participating the HA activities.

Personally I don't find the demo application usable for testing lossy encodings because it hasn't a possibility to specify the start and end points. I always isolate one potentional problem passage at a time and ABX it separately. It can be as short as a single cymbal crash or something like that. If the start or end position produces a pop that bothers me I can usually fix that by moving the start or end marker very slightly. The current implementation is more like a switchbox for a speaker test, i.e. you let a track play continuously and switch between the "speaker pairs".

In addition, it doesn't work if the tested audio samples don't have identical durations. Lossy decoders don't always decode the original sample amount. The feature in ABC/HR for Java that can remove silent samples from the beginning works fine for practical purposes. It doesn't matter if one of the tested sample files have a few additional samples in the end.

It would be great if someone would combine your work and the now quite abandoned ABC/HR for Java and keep the development active.

This post has been edited by Alex B: Jun 1 2010, 20:35