| Sonic Visualiser contains advanced waveform and spectrogram viewers, as well as editors for many sorts of audio annotations. Besides visualisation, it can make and play selections based on the locations of automatically detected features, seamlessly loop playback of single or multiple noncontiguous regions, synthesise annotations for playback, and slow down playback while retaining display synchronisation. Sonic Visualiser supports the Vamp plugin API for plugins that extract descriptive or analytical data from audio. Vamp plugins for onset, pitch and note detection and tempo tracking using the Aubio library are available, as well as further plugins for tempo tracking, chromagram analysis, constant-Q spectrogram, spectral centroid, power curve, key estimation, tonal change detection, harmonic spectrogram, and a large number of low-level spectral features. There is also a comprehensive SDK for use by developers of Vamp plugins and hosts. Features - Load audio files in WAV, Ogg and MP3 formats, and view their waveforms.
- Look at audio visualisations such as spectrogram views, with interactive adjustment of display parameters.
- Annotate audio data by adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and
- curves. Overlay annotations on top of one another with aligned scales, and overlay annotations on top of
- waveform or spectrogram views.
- View the same data at multiple time resolutions simultaneously (for close-up and overview).
- Run feature-extraction plugins to calculate annotations automatically, using algorithms such as beat trackers, pitch detectors and so on.
- Import annotation layers from various text file formats.
- Import note data from MIDI files, view it alongside other frequency scales, and play it with the original audio.
- Play back the audio plus synthesised annotations, taking care to synchronise playback with display.
- Select areas of interest, optionally snapping to nearby feature locations, and audition individual and comparative selections in seamless loops.
- Time-stretch playback, slowing right down or speeding up to a tiny fraction or huge multiple of the original speed while retaining a synchronised display.
- Export audio regions and annotation layers to external files.
New in v1.2 - You can double-click using the measurement tool in the spectrogram to get an instant measurement rectangle for a feature. This is a purely graphical feature that works by calculating the boundary of a contiguous region of pixels "similar to" the one you double-clicked on; it does not use audio analysis. Adjusting the gain and colour scheme etc of the spectrogram will (by design) affect the measurements obtained this way.
- The spectrum can now optionally show frequency estimates of peaks aligned with a piano keyboard along the horizontal axis (this need some refinement).
- The harmonic cursor in the spectrogram has moved from the Select tool to the Measurement tool. There is now a similar harmonic cursor in the spectrum. Both of them show more information as text alongside the cursor than previously.
- There is a new Erase tool for erasing individual points from an editable layer.
- Several keyboard shortcuts have changed -- all of the Alt+key shortcuts now either use Ctrl or a plain keypress with no modifier, to avoid clashes with window manager shortcuts and to make them easier to use and remember
- The playback controls are now in a Playback menu as well as the toolbar.
- There is a new key and mouse control reference under Help (or press F2).
- You can double-click on a pane in navigate mode to jump to a time.
- All of the single-colour layers (waveform, time values etc) now allow you to define your own colours as well as using the built-in set. The colour of a layer is now shown next to its name on the pane.
- When you add a new single-colour layer it will use a default colour that is not yet in use in another layer (if there is one).
- Single-colour layers can now optionally have black backgrounds (with a set of lighter colours in the default colour palette that use black backgrounds by default).
- There's a new Printer colour scheme in the spectrogram with only a small number of grey shades.
- Vertical zoom in a log-scaled spectrogram is much more intuitive; it now leaves the point that was in the centre of the visible area in the centre after zoom, instead of the point that was in the centre of the linear range corresponding to the visible area.
- You can now turn a colour 3d plot layer upside down by clicking the Invert Vertical Scale button.
- There's a new Layer Summary window which shows the panes and layer data in a tree layout. This is very simplistic at the moment.
- Each pane now has an [X] button at its top left, which removes that pane when clicked.
- There's a new Solo play mode toggle button; when active, only the currently selected pane is played. This is also the default when time alignment is in use.
- Rewind/ffwd now stay confined to the selection if Play Selection is enabled; also, the rewind and ffwd "one step" buttons are now enabled even if there is no time instants layer for them to align to (they align to the time ruler instead and so jump in steps of a size dependent on the zoom level).
- You can now export note layers to MIDI.
- MIDI note velocity is partially supported. Note velocity is retained when importing and exporting MIDI and is used in playback, but it is not yet shown in the display and cannot yet be edited.
- You can now drag-and-drop files (of whatever type) onto SV from other programs such as file managers or web browsers.
- MP3 files (and Ogg, but they aren't supported on Windows at the moment) are now decoded in a background thread so you can see the start of the track without waiting for the rest to decode.
- Mac builds of SV can now load AAC/mp4 files and anything else supported by QuickTime.
- There is now an option to resample audio files on import if they don't match the samplerate of the first file loaded. By default this is switched off, as it affects the visible waveform. The default behaviour is unchanged (play at the wrong rate). There is still no option to handle multiple rates "correctly" (i.e. by resampling on playback and showing the waveforms at different resolutions according to each one's underlying rate) and there probably never will be.
- SV can now open .m3u playlist files, though it's a hazardous thing to do as it simply loads all the files in the playlist at once.
- SV now has various options for how to number tapped time instants (bar/beat, plain counter, time in seconds, tempo etc).
- The official builds use Qt 4.3, which fixes some nasty bugs in the file dialog that the version 1.0 builds suffered from.
| |
