---
title: 'Panako: a scalable audio search system'
canonical: https://0110.be/posts/Panako%3A_a_scalable_audio_search_system
markdown_url: https://0110.be/posts/Panako%3A_a_scalable_audio_search_system.md
id: 496
published_at: '2022-10-12T00:00:00Z'
updated_at: '2023-07-04T09:25:18Z'
author: Joren
tags:
- name: Panako
  markdown_url: https://0110.be/tags/Panako.md
- name: Research papers
  markdown_url: https://0110.be/tags/Research%20papers.md
- name: UGent
  markdown_url: https://0110.be/tags/UGent.md
---

# Panako: a scalable audio search system

<div style="float:right; margin: 8px; width:20%">
<img src="https://0110.be/files/attachments/496/papers_vs_software.webp" style="object-fit:contain; width: 100%;" /><small>Fig: DALL.E 2 imagining a fight between papers and software.</small>

</div>
Recently I have published a paper titled [*'Panako: a scalable audio search system'*](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.04554) in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). The journal is [a 'hack' to circumvent the focus on citable papers](https://www.arfon.org/announcing-the-journal-of-open-source-software) in the academic world: getting recognition for publishing software as a researcher is not straightforward.

The research output tracking system of Ghent University (biblio) and Flanders FWO's academic profile are not built to track 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](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01516-2) which makes this focus on papers quite relevant to me.

The paper aims to make the recent development on [Panako](https://github.com/JorenSix/Panako) *'count'*. Thanks to the JOSS review process the Panako 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 Panako:

> "*Panako solves the problem of finding short audio fragments in large digital audio archives. The content based audio search algorithm implemented in Panako is able to identify a short audio query in a large database of thousands of hours of audio using an acoustic fingerprinting technique.*"