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### SEGMENTINO VAMP PLUGIN ###

Segmentino is a Vamp plugin for automatic music structural segmentation, based on an algorithm first used in Mauch's paper on "Using Musical Structure to Enhance Automatic Chord Transcription" (http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/publications/55).

## Installation ##

Vamp plugins (http://www.vamp-plugins.org/) can be used with any Vamp host. Popular free hosts are Sonic Visualiser (http://sonicvisualiser.org), Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) and Sonic Annotator (command-line tool, http://www.omras2.org/sonicannotator().

For the newest Segmentino plugin downloads, ready to be installed, go to the  Downloads page: http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/segmenter-vamp-plugin/files. 

Installation instructions for Mac, Windows, Linux can be found at: http://www.vamp-plugins.org/download.html.

## Method Overview ##

The idea of the method is quite simple. A beat-quantised chroma representation is used to calculate pair-wise similarities between beats (really: beat "shingles", i.e. multi-beat vectors). Based on this first similarity calculation, an exhaustive comparison of all possible segments of reasonable length in beats is executed, and segments are added to form segment families if they are sufficiently similar to another "family member".

Now comes the crucial greedy step: having accumulated a lot of families, the families are rated, and the one with the highest score is used as the first segmentation group that gets annotated. This last step is repeated until no more families fit the remaining "holes" in the song that haven't already been assigned to a segment. This is described in Mauch's thesis: http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/publications/56 as "heuristic of a music editor who tries to make a concise transcription to make orientation in the score easier, and to save space (or paper)".

More details in Mauch's thesis: http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/publications/56.

## Limitations ##

This method was developed for "classic rock" music, and therefore assumes a few characteristics that are not necessarily found in other music: repetition of harmonic sequences in the music that coincide with structural segments in a song; a steady beat; segments of a certain length; corresponding segments have the same length in beats. Furthermore, as with any audio algorithm, the method doesn't work perfectly even if these conditions are actually fulfilled.

## Implementation ##

This Vamp implementation was coded by Massimiliano Zanoni, Matthias Mauch and Chris Cannam. It is similar to Mauch's original Matlab implementation used in the publications, but not exactly the same. The beat times are extracted using Davies's beat tracker as implemented in the Queen Mary Vamp plugins (http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/qm-vamp-plugins), which in turn is based on the QM DSP library (http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/qm-dsp). NNLS Chroma (http://isophonics.net/nnls-chroma) is used as a chroma extractor, by borrowing code from the Vamp plugin of the same name.

## Examples ##

Some example YouTube videos showing off the range of quality of segmentation one can get using Segmentino.

1. excellent: "Bring On The Night" http://www.youtube.com/v/c0W_n_i3Ksg&autoplay=1
2. very good: "Dirty Work" http://www.youtube.com/v/9lWrvvP4PCw&autoplay=1
3. less than good: "Every Kinda People" http://www.youtube.com/v/ICz-PnhfD0M&autoplay=1
4 complete failure: "New York New York" http://www.youtube.com/v/LcmTCeAKM48&autoplay=1

## Citation, License and Use ##

Please cite one of the publications indicated on the Publications page https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/publications?project_id=segmenter-vamp-plugin.

The plugin comes with a GPL license. We strongly encourage you to indicate whether your services employ the plugin, even if you only use it to generate data (i.e. not to re-distribute code or binaries). Please mention the authors and Queen Mary, University of London. More licensing details in the source code.

## Pronunciation ##

Segmentino is pronounced "segmen'TEEno" (not "seg'MENtino", the third person plural conjunctive of the Italian verb "segmentare").