Scripting AP.exe

AnalysisPrograms.exe works best when processing single audio files. This has a few advantages:

It simplifies the code. We don't need to know about the particular way you store your data, or the way you want your data processed.

It allows for greater customization. By building a set of composable tools, it allows you to choose what analysis is done, and when. You want it all? You got it. You only want the first bit done once, and the second bit done 100 times with parameter sweeps? Go for it.

It is easier to parallelize. You want to use your university HPC? Write your own distributed analysis? Or just run it in sequence? That's all your choice.

Despite these advantages, we recognize it is useful to have example of how large analyses might be completed. Thus the scripts you find in this folder contain various examples (in various languages) of composing workflows with AnalysisPrograms.exe.

You can find a collection of example scripts here: https://github.com/QutEcoacoustics/audio-analysis/tree/master/scripts

PowerShell

You'll see a lot of scripts in that folder that are written in PowerShell. If you're not familiar with it, you can consider it as the Windows equivalent of the Bash shell.

We like PowerShell because we think the syntax is more reasonable than Bash and the enhanced support for dates, times, and regular expressions are well worth the investment.

As of PowerShell 6.0 the shell is cross platform! If you're not convinced, the scripts should be easy enough to reimplement in your favourite language (like Bash)--and we would of course appreciate any translated scripts sent back to us as contributed examples.

Any other language

You can use any programming language to script AP.exe.

R is a popular choice. We have a short guide for using AP.exe with R