We present a plugin implementation for the multi-platform WaveSurfer sound editor. Added functionalities are the semi-automatic extraction of beats at diverse levels of the metrical hierarchy as well as uploading and downloading functionalities to a music metadata database. It is built upon existing open source (GPL-licenced) audio processing tools, namely WaveSurfer, BeatRoot and CLAM, in the intent to expand the scope of those softwares. It is therefore also provided as GPL code with the explicit goal that researchers in the audio processing community can freely use and improve it. We provide technical details of the implementation as well as practical use cases. We also motivate the use of rhythmic metadata in Music Information Retrieval scenarios.

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Ambiances are background recordings used in audiovisual productions to make listeners feel they are in places like a pub or a farm. Accessing to commercially available atmosphere libraries is a convenient alternative to sending teams to record ambiances yet they limit the creation in different ways. First, they are already mixed, which reduces the flexibility to add, remove individual sounds or change its panning. Secondly, the number of ambient libraries is limited. We propose a semi-automatic system for ambiance generation. The system creates ambiances on demand given text queries by fetching relevant sounds from a large sound effect database and importing them into a sequencer multitrack project. Ambiances of diverse nature can be created easily. Several controls are provided to the users to refine the type of samples and the sound arrangement.

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