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

[googlebot]

@bilbo

I'm not interested in "How to bootstrap an open source community project for dummies" kind of advice. If that had been my goal, I would be sitting here churning out feature request implementations, so that everybody would feel involved and love me. Eventually other altruists would chime in and also show off what they can do.

Sorry, I'm not that type and that hasn't been my goal from the beginning. Many much more rewarding things for my free time come to my mind instantly.

I can only repeat: The main motivation for AA was personal, technical interest (and not becoming an admired project maintainer). I shared it on Hydrogenaudio with the anticipation of professional exchange and collaboration. I don't think I owe anyone any more commitment than what I have already delivered to justify that anticipation posteriorly. And it is really no big deal, when no one finds the time to contribute anything right now. I guess I would have done it anyway.

@all

Admittedly I expected more initial interest for a topic so close to HA's Magna Carta. But I have got the impression now, that I may really just have hit the wrong time. Thank you for the recent feedback. I agree with C.R. Helmrich, that there are plenty more potential features left, that would be worth adding. So maybe AA isn't really 95% done but 50%. Any commits are still welcome! I'm willing to help. The next thing I'm going to focus on is marking/looping. But I can't promise when I will find the time.

@C.R.Helmrich

While MUSHRA is certainly interesting, I'm not planning to implement it right now. For anyone interested in the artifact-free-switching part of AA, it is cleanly encapsulated within the SwichtableArrayClip class (in another thread I have also posted a solution for streams). It might be pretty easy to integrate into your own applications and is both suited for pushing and pulling audio pipelines.

This post has been edited by googlebot: Jun 3 2010, 17:02