Mac OS X

Developers who are new to a language or a platform are usually greeted by encoding issues. One example is beginner PHP/MySQL developers. They usually create a simple form page, post some data with it, persist that data with on the back-end, refresh the page, and realize that all unicode characters are gone and in their place, there are some weird, incomprehensible characters.

I’ve recently encountered a similar problem in one of my projects, namely, a desktop application written in C# running on Mono. When run on OS X, my app began acting strangely, and when I looked at the logs, I realized that all umlauts/diacritics/accents on my characters were next to the base characters, rather than on top or bottom. Here’s an example:

While investigating how services like Shazam worked, how they identified music using audio samples, I stumbled upon Echoprint, an open-source music identification project, and when I did, I immediately jumped to experiment with it.

The Echoprint project has many sub-projects in itself, but the simplest way to use it is to send the audio sample in a specific format to an Echoprint server. The Echoprint project already has a free-to-use (keep in mind that with “free” comes request limitations) online Echoprint server that identifies the music for you, so you only need to create an appropriate code to call the service.

The echoprint-codegen project is used exactly for that purpose: it takes an audio input and produces a code out of it, ready to use in Echoprint service requests. There are no binary distributions for the project, so you need to manually build it after downloading (or cloning) the project on your PC.

First, clone the project from the Github repository.