Essentia

This subpage is dedicated to taming the beast otherwise known as Essentia. Essentia is actually a very power library of sound processing algorithms that allows you and I to extract various features in an audio file. Algorithms in this library have in fact been used to identify music in large-scale databases.

Using built-in extractors in Essentia (2018-02-28)

One of the cool features about Essentia is that you can also find pre-compiled 'extractors' which can give you many useful acoustic features in your sound files without ever needing to install Essentia or programme anything. These extractors are command-line programmes where you input the path to your soundwave and output the calculated features in a .json or .yaml file - it is that easy!

You can find out more about the extractors here.

Installing Essentia on Windows 10 (2017-09-19)

Essentia is a Python library of algorithms used for audio analysis and music information retrieval developed by the Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Although the Essentia website does contain instructions on how to install the library using a Windows 10 computer, I was rather slow and did things I didn't have to do (e.g. installing Ubuntu alongside Windows 10...). So here are my step-by-step instructions on getting it work without the unnecessary twists and turns:

TL;DR instructions

• Install Windows Subsystem for Linux
• Install Xming
• Install Jupyter Notebook using pip (NOT using Anaconda and in Python 2!!)
• Download master branch of Essentia on GitHub
• Install necessary dependencies, compile and build Essentia
• Don't do the post-installation tests (or risk installing an new operating system - see below)

Detailed Walk-through

• Follow this guide and install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This allows you to run a Linux shell in Windows. Make sure you have the newest distribution of Linux (Type sudo do-release-upgrade in bash to upgrade).
• Install Xming X Server for Windows. WSL was designed without graphical output in mind, so to do anything interactive you will need an X Server. This is important, especially if you want to use Jupyter Notebook or plot things (or open Firefox from bash for that matter).
• Go to GitHub and download the master branch of Essentia to get the latest code. Click on the green button that says 'clone or download'. Select 'Download zip', then unpack the zip file as you normally would.
• Now we open bash and follow the instructions and install Jupyter Notebook with pip. First we install pip by typing:

sudo apt-get install python-pip 

and we upgrade to the latest version of pip with the command:

sudo pip install --upgrade pip

then we install Jupyter notebook with

sudo pip install jupyter

(NOTE 1: Although it is recommended that you install Jupyter using Anaconda, we do not do this here because there are compatibility issues with different versions of libraries in Anaconda that do not work in Essentia.)

(NOTE 2: Python 3 support in Essentia is still not quite there yet, we keep Jupyter in Pyton 2.)

• Still staying in bash, follow the instructions to install all required dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libyaml-dev libfftw3-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libavresample-dev python-dev libsamplerate0-dev libtag1-dev python-numpy-dev python-numpy python-yaml

then

./waf configure --mode=release --build-static --with-python --with-cpptests --with-examples --with-vamp

to configure Essentia. Then type

./waf

to compile the library. This took around 10 minutes for me. Afterwards, we install Essentia with the command

sudo ./waf install

• Once you are done, do not run the tests as stated on the website! You will fail them because the test audio files are missing. They were not part of the master branch that you downloaded, and neither were they part of the latest stable official release (Essential 2.1 beta4). And if you were wondering, this was the point I decided to install Ubuntu, tried and failed to run Essentia using Python 3 and Anaconda, realising why the tests failed in the first place, and then switching back to bash on Windows...
• Open Jupyter notebook (by typing jupyter notebook) and follow the tutorials, adapting accordingly.