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3.1.1 Creating collections manually

A simple way to create a collection is the unix ls command. For example:

     ls /home/gtzan/data/sound/reggae/*.wav > reggae.mf

reggae.mf will look like this:

     /home/gtzan/data/sound/reggae/foo.wav
     /home/gtzan/data/sound/reggae/bar.wav

Any text editor can be used to create collection files. The only constraint is that the name of the collections file must have a .mf extension such as reggae.mf. In addition, any line starting with the # character is ignored. For Windows Visual Studio, change the slash character separating directories appropriately.

3.1.2 Labels

Labels may be added to collections by appending tab-seperated labels after each sound file:

     /home/gtzan/data/sound/reggae/foo.wav \t music
     /home/gtzan/data/sound/reggae/bar.wav \t speech

The \t represents an actual tab character. This allows you to create a “master” collection which includes different kinds of labelled sound files:

     cat music.mf speech.mf > all.mf