
Sonic Visualiser: Viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files - cannam
http://sonicvisualiser.org/index.html
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trishume
I used this for developing an audio recognizer
([https://github.com/trishume/PopClick](https://github.com/trishume/PopClick))
and it was incredibly cool and useful.

You can write your own recognition and analysis plugins pretty easily and then
overlay those on the spectrogram so you get a sense of what your program is
doing and why it is going wrong. I don't think I could have ever successfully
gotten a recognizer working if I hadn't found Sonic Visualiser. It's awesome.

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jarmitage
Sonic Visualiser v3 has just been released, here's a list of features:
[http://sonicvisualiser.org/new-in-v3.html](http://sonicvisualiser.org/new-
in-v3.html)

Also it's open source: [https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-
visualiser/f...](https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-
visualiser/files)

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MrJagil
Been using this for years to recognise chords with the help of the Chordino
extension. Great software, but the controls are a bit cumbersome (scrolling,
zooming etc). Further, when you do audio editing, you rarely work at 0dB, so
i've had many a shock tabbing into Sonic Visualiser and pressing play.

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cannam
That's good to know -- if you'd like to be any more detailed (e.g. how would
you ideally like it to handle levels in order not to blow your ears off, or
where are the controls most awkward) that would also be useful.

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MrJagil
Just have it at -6 on startup. I'd be happy to give more detail. Email is in
my description.

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rotexo
I Love Sonic Visualiser. I use it all the time for musical analysis to slice
audio files for playback in SuperCollider. I only wish it had an annotation
layer text file format like Praat does for phonetic analysis of speech audio--
I know you can easily export CSV files, but the way Praat uses textgrids
always felt more intuitive.

I would also highly recommend using Sonic Visualiser to prototype an analysis
pipeline, then automate the analysis with the Python vamp plugin host [1]. I
think there is a command line interface called Sonic Annotator, but I never
used it.

[1] [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vamp](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vamp)

Edit: the text file thing is probably what the xml .svl format is for, huh

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cannam
Yes, the .svl file is a single layer from the session format, in XML. (The
session format is itself an XML file, but compressed with bzip2 compression.)

One thing SV does lack is a layer file format that can easily be interchanged
between SV itself (for label alignment) and a text editor (for bulk text
changes). Neither is there any built-in text editor for editing the whole
content of a text transcription at once. I suppose this has to do with the
initial focus being on music rather than speech, and having no particular
desire to "compete" with Praat.

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rotexo
Thanks for the explanation!

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blinry
Shameless self-plug: I'm working on a similar tool for video files:
[http://nordlicht.github.io/](http://nordlicht.github.io/)

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woollysammoth
The band Vulfpeck used the PNG export for this recent video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbO2e65gmwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbO2e65gmwg)

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drawbars
Also a staple piece of kit for ARGs that are using audio-based clues. Thanks
for developing this software!

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rishabhd
Have been using for this quite a long time, good tool for solving audio based
ctf challenges as well.

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imaginenore
So why would I use it over Audacity, which can also show the audio spectrum?

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detaro
From a quick look at the screenshots, and the other comments here: because it
offers more than the basic spectrum view of Audacity?

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anotheryou
There is no better tool I know :) Especially with the nice export function.

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tomovo
No Aphex Twin in the screenshot section? Missed opportunity right there.

