Sonic Visualiser: Viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files | Hacker News Reader

Sonic Visualiser: Viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files

sonicvisualiser.org

94 pointscannam19 comments

I used this for developing an audio recognizer (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.

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

Also it's open source: https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-visualiser/f...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Thanks for the explanation!

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a big difference between just showing a bucketed Fourier transform of the whole audible spectrum, and showing a high-resolution, log-scale, musically-informed visualization of the part that can be heard as musical notes.

More detailed dedicated visualisations, broader support for analysis plugins, and a focus on visualisation and analysis work rather than editing. (Audacity can use some of the same analysis plugins though.)

I don't understand why this question was downvoted.

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

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

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