Prog beware, with Music Annotator, you can happily sweep technical proficiency aside and start working out the chords of your favourite songs in minutes. Well, that’s the idea anyway. Designed by the Musical Technology Group from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, here’s what they say it can do:

"The purpose of the project is to supervise and correct the results of automated audio-feature extraction algorithms and generate manually edited annotations of audio as training examples or ground truth for those algorithms."

Hmm, basically you can analyse a variety of popular audio formats (ogg, mp3 and wav files) through the idiot proof interface that will quickly get you on track to musical prowess. Detection itself was variable but impressive and one can only imagine that it will only get better as more updates and improvements are added.

More info and download here.

11 May 2006