~ Olaf: a lightweight, portable audio search system

Fig: Some AI imagining audio search.

Recently I have published a paper titled ‘Olaf: a lightweight, portable audio search system’ in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). The journal is a ‘hack’ to circumvent the focus on citable papers in the academic world: getting recognition for publishing software as a researcher is not straightforward.

Both Ghent University’s research output tracking system and Flanders FWO academic profile do not allow to enter software as research output. The focus is still solely on papers, even when custom developed research software has become a fundamental aspect in many research areas. My role is somewhere between that of a ‘pure’ researcher and that of a research software engineer which makes this focus on papers quite relevant to me.

The paper aims to make the recent development on Olaf ‘count’. Thanks to the JOSS review process the Olaf software was improved considerably: CI, unit tests, documentation, containerization,… The paper was a good reason to improve on all these areas which are all too easy to neglect. The paper itself is a short, rather general overview of Olaf:

“Olaf stands for Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting and solves the problem of finding short audio fragments in large digital audio archives. The content-based audio search algorithm implemented in Olaf can identify a short audio query in a large database of thousands of hours of audio using an acoustic fingerprinting technique.”

Command Line Application, Music Information Retrieval, Research papers, and UGent