MATLAB

Typical video files, such as MP4 files with H.264 compression, are usually small in size and with high visual quality. Such files are suitable for visual inspection but do not work well for video analysis. In most cases, computer vision software prefers to work with raw data or other compression formats. The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab works best with these file types: Video: use.jpg (Motion.jpg) as the compression format. This compresses each frame individually. Use .AVI as the container, since this is the one that works best on all platforms. Audio: use uncompressed audio (16-bit PCM), saved as .WAV files (.AIFF usually also works fine). If you need to use compression, MP3 compression (MPEG-1, Layer 3) is still more versatile than AAC (used in .MP4 files). If you use a bitrate of 192 Kbs or higher, you should not get too many artefacts. Many people ask me how to convert from typical MP4 files (with H.264 video compression and AAC audio compression). The easiest solution (I think) is to use FFMPEG, the versatile command-line utility. Here is a oneliner that will convert from an .MP4 file into a .AVI file with.jpg and PCM audio: ...

Yesterday I presented the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab in the late-breaking demo session at the ISMIR conference in Paris. The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab (MGT) aims at assisting music researchers with importing, preprocessing, analyzing, and visualizing video, audio, and motion capture data in a coherent manner within Matlab. Most of the concepts in the toolbox are based on the Musical Gestures Toolbox that I first developed for Max more than a decade ago. A lot of the Matlab coding for the new version was done in the master’s thesis by Bo Zhou. ...

I am working on some plots in Matlab, where I am using the filename as the title of the plot. In many of the files I am using underscores (_) as separator, and the result is that Matlab creates a subscript. So for a file called b_staccato_004, I get a title bstaccato004. After some googling I found that this is because Matlab per default treats such text strings as LaTeX code. The solution is to use the interpreter message locally: ...