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~ Updates for Olaf - The Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting system

Olaf
Fig: Olaf fingerprinter.

I have updated Olaf – the Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting system. Olaf is a piece of technology that uses digital signal processing to identify audio files by analyzing unique, robust, and compact audio characteristics – or “fingerprints”. The fingerprints are stored in a database for efficient comparison and matching. The database index allows for fast and accurate audio recognition, even in the presence of distortions, noise, and other variations.

Olaf is unique because it works on traditional computing devices, embedded microprocessors and in the browser. To this end tried to use ANSI C. C is a relatively small programming language but has very little safeguards and is full of exiting footguns. I enjoy the limitations of C: limitations foster creativity. I also made ample use of the many footguns C has to offer: buffer overflows, memory leaks, … However, with the current update I think most serious bugs have been found. Some of the changes to Olaf include:

Anyhow, what originally started as a rather quick and dirty hack has been improved quite a bit. The takeaway message: in the world of software it does seem possible to polish a turd.