Tools for music information retrieval and playing

State-of-the-art MIR issues are presented and discussed both from the symbolic and audio points of view. As for the symbolic aspects, different approaches are presented in order to provide an overview of the different available solutions for particular MIR tasks. This section ends with an overview of MX, the IEEE standard XML language specifically designed to support interchange between musical notation, performance, analysis, and retrieval applications. As for the audio level, first we focus on blind tasks like beat and tempo tracking, pitch tracking, and automatic recognition of musical instruments. Then we present algorithms that work both on compressed and uncompressed data. We analyze the relationships between MIR and feature extraction presenting examples of possible applications. Finally we focus on automatic music synchronization and we introduce a new audio player that supports the MX logic layer and allows users to play both score and audio coherently.