17. A system for searching for audio features within multimedia files, comprising: a user interface for specifying a query criterion comprising one or more classes of audio sounds, each of the classes comprising acoustic characteristics of a range of sounds; and an audio feature extractor that (i) queries an audio track of a multimedia file to detect occurrences of the classes (ii) retrieves at least a segment of the searched multimedia file, if the segment contains at least one occurrence of the classes.
17. A system for searching for audio features within multimedia files, comprising: a user interface for specifying a query criterion comprising one or more classes of audio sounds, each of the classes comprising acoustic characteristics of a range of sounds; and an audio feature extractor that (i) queries an audio track of a multimedia file to detect occurrences of the classes (ii) retrieves at least a segment of the searched multimedia file, if the segment contains at least one occurrence of the classes. 30. The system of claim 17 , wherein the multimedia file is a video file.