Recommendations for music processing library? [closed]

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I'm in a Music Theory class and for my final, I've decided to code a program that would output simple statistics about a given song. I was wondering, does anybody have any good libraries for such a task? I don't really like C++ or C, but if I'm forced to use them, I will.

I've tried MIT's Music21 for Python (I was excited, as I liked its features), but I never got it to work... Are there any libraries that can just give me raw data (frequencies plotted in time) of any given MP3 file? Thanks!

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To find frequencies plotted in time with code you will probably have to do some frequency-domain transformations to obtain that, such as FFT or wavelets. What you obtain as raw data in an audio file is a discrete signal of time-varying voltage. Python has a built-in library for wav files, and with numpy you can do the FFT analysis on the signal. One suggestion I have is PureData (http://puredata.info/) , a visual programming environment for musical purposes. That software will help you a lot, and save you a lot of trouble with the DSP part of music software development. With PureData, you can use frequencies plotted in time easily. If the idea is to develop something for a music theory class, it is a great solution.

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libsndfile for C/C++ is good, but maybe a bit low-level. What are you planning on doing with it? You can look at javax.sound.sampled for Java too.

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Unless your are familiar with graphical programming languages (pd, max, reaktor) i'd recommend SuperCollider. It has an fft library, reasonable gui/graphics libraries, but its real strength lies in the SmallTalk language its based in, which provides rich Functional and Object Oriented facilities. I find this system a real joy to work with. It comes with an interactive interpreter which helps where development is more ad hoc than structured.

Try it, you might like it.