I just finished a computer science course and built a key detection tool for DJs as my final project. The tool is called KeyFinder. It’s designed to work primarily with EDM, but it’s highly tweakable and I’ve had decent results with various genres.
In addition to a batch key detection interface which can write to metadata tags, it includes a musical visualisation tool called a chromagram. I’ve found this quite useful for visualising chord structures, melodies and key changes, and I think it’s pretty unique in the DJ software world; I haven’t seen any other tools that have something similar.
I got good accuracy during my experiments but unfortunately I didn’t test it on a wide selection of music. I had very little time and had to key it all manually and then get the results verified. It would be great to improve KeyFinder to work on a wide variety of genres.
So I’m releasing it for free under the GPL, in the hope the community finds it useful. It’s a bit primitive, and for Mac only at present, but it should be pretty simple to port to Windows if there’s interest.
If you want to try it you can download a Mac binary here. My write-up which describes the algorithms is also there if you’re into that kind of thing. If anyone has any interest in working on it, or any comments or questions, feel free to get in touch here or using the email address on that page.
will have a closer look tomorrow..
one thing: you could implement the chamelot circle (if there’s no copyright or smthng). i just input it into the custom keycodes. but this needs some time..
Unfortunately the Camelot codes are now the intellectual property of Mixed In Key. I intend to get back in touch with them to talk about licensing but it may not happen.
As you say, the custom codes function can be used for something similar.
There’s a Windows version up on the site now, though it’s probably not entirely stable. I’ve actually only tested it on XP, as that’s the only Windows I have access to.
If anyone has time to try it out and send feedback, I’d appreciate it.
Not really, I’m sorry but I’m not planning on looking in Event Viewer and everything since I’m pretty busy atm. Here’s a screenie:
The track about to be added is : D Mad - She gave happiness (Arty Remix). Traktor is unable to scan the BPM of this song properly(and I downloaded it off zippyshare.com). I don’t care about this too much since I’ve only got about 20 tracks that can’t be read by Traktor.
W&W - Alpha (Tenishia Remix) can’t be copied as well, but this song doesn’t give me any problem in Traktor(Traktor even reads the key - wtf - !)
I’m using one 1440x900 and one 1024x768 screen, so it looks weird
I’ll definitely give this a run through did you compare results against any of the other Key Detection softwares? I’ll compare it against MiK and BeaTunes at least for a hundred or so and see if the results are similar. Thanks for sharing the project notes I was thinking of doing something similar for a Project in my course. My idea was for a MP3 manager for iPad. I have only really been kicking the idea around in my head for a few weeks and I’m not where close to even needing to have a full idea worked out to start on but it’s nice to see someone doing something similar.
I think they copyrighted the camelot circle which gives each musical key a code number between 1 and 12? Maybe they’ve only copyrighted the actual circle diagram… surely you can’t copyright/patent the idea of converting, say, the key/note of “C” into a number?
There’s a new version up with some bug fixes and minor new features.
It also fixes a couple of the most common Windows dependencies, though not all of them.
@bartboy, you can find a (limited) comparison with MIK and RE on pages 51-53 of my report.
Awesome. I’ll be following your project, hopefully your software will get a proper Win 7 version and camelot coding. As Mil0, I too find it weird that MiK as copyright on letters? It’s like getting copyright on converting ‘a’ into ‘1’ or ‘b’ into ‘2’. Surely the copyrights laws are that messed up (properly are, but one can hope).
KF won’t be getting Camelot coding: I spoke to MIK just recently, they’re not doing freeware licenses any more. You can add your own custom codes into KF though, obviously.
As for how messed up the intellectual property rules are… no comment =)
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