audioDB

h1. AudioDB Meeting, Goldsmiths Dec 2011

MC, CR, CC, LF

*Current state*

 * Library

 ** Mainline code in trunk works OK

 ** Library API is "quite good"

 ** Error handling is a very weak point

 * Indexing

 ** LSH should be in a separate library, but it has no clear interface yet

 ** There are contortions between e.g. query.c and query-indexed.c

 ** There is no introspection, e.g. no way to say "is there an index that satisfies this query?" -- only to say "satisfy this query" and fail

 * Tools

 ** Currently we have a library, and a command-line binary which does not use the library API but instead uses some of the same .o files directly

 ** Some functions are not properly library-ized, for example the command-line tool is the only way to create an index at the moment

 ** Old fftExtract binary is still in use in some places with a new latent feature separation front-end

 * Bindings

 ** Lisp, Python: Quite good

 ** pd: broken-ish

 ** Some additional interfaces e.g. SOAP that predate the stable API and are pretty horrible now

 ** Bindings are not built automatically

 * Documentation

 ** Essentially none

 ** Public header has some rather cryptic stuff

 * Licence

 ** Currently all GPL

*Actions*

 * Philosophy: Project should be a set of modules -- not so much a database, as libraries with tools that make use of them

 * Discard broken / ancient interfaces e.g. SOAP

 * Refactor API so that the (existing) "world object" concept is carried through in order to retain error condition state

 * Document API

 * Rebuild command-line utility in either C C++ or Python using the API only, and augment API if there are things it needs that don't exist there yet

 * Document command-line utility

 * (Keep bindings in same repo, don't spin them out)

 * Try to build module API for LSH so that alternative implementations could be introduced

 * Licence: LGPL for library, BSD for bindings