jAudio Feature Extractor

An audio file is a lot more than just hearing your favorite tune when pressing the play button. In order to enjoy good quality, various variables and components need to be taken into account. To help in this regard, jAudio Feature Extractor comes with a large variety of tools with which to analyze different sound files and grab data of interest.

Just as the name might suggest, the application is built on the Java platform, so you need to have Java Runtime Environment installed on your computer for it to function. This makes it usable across various devices. The build requires no installation, meaning you can easily carry it around on an USB flash drive.

The application isn’t much to look at in terms of visual design. However, elements seem to cleverly combine, making accommodation easy, at least until you get under the hood. The main windows lets you view all files you decide to work on, a large list of audio features, as well as several functions for quick processing.

Using the application doesn’t mean that at the end of the process you end up with a specific part of the content. On the contrary, it targets special sound file features, such as magnitude and power spectrum, compactness, spectral rolloff point and flux, variability, root mean square, fraction of low energy windows, zero crossings, beat histogram, and a lot more. Each comes with its own set of parameters, for which you can view and set dimensions, and choose whether or not to save.

You can trigger playback of audio files just like you would in regular audio players. You can only choose to play samples. On the other hand, this is also designed for analysis purposes, since the application loads files of formats like WAV, WAVE, AIF, AIFF, AIFC, AU and SND.

Some other built-in tools are at your disposal besides the one found in the main window. Audio files can be synthesized, bringing up a main window to set duration, gain, panning, type of synthesis, amplitude, frequency, and more. When done, fields you choose to save are stored as XML documents.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that jAudio Feature Extractor is a powerful audio processing tool, but not meant for everyday activities, or individuals of all experience levels. If you’re not really sure what’s going on behind a sound file, the application is of little use. Overall, it’s worth a try for complex analysis, editing, and extracting of various different features.