Sonic Visualiser 0.9rc1 review

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.

License: GPL OS: Mac OS X File size: 0K Developer: Centre for Digital Music Price: $0.00 Updated: 22 May 2006

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Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.

The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the program you reach for when you find a musical recording you want to study rather than simply hear.
As well as a number of features designed to make exploring audio data as revealing and fun as possible, Sonic Visualiser also has powerful annotation capabilities to help you to describe what you find, and the ability to run automated annotation and analysis plugins in the new Vamp analysis plugin format.

We hope Sonic Visualiser will be of particular interest to musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers and anyone else looking for a friendly way to take a look at what lies inside the audio file.
Sonic Visualiser is Free Software, distributed under the GNU General Public License and available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows. It was developed at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, by Chris Cannam (of Fervent Software, Rosegarden, Studio to Go!, and DSSI).

Here are some key features of "Sonic Visualiser":
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 it down to as little as 10% of the original speed while retaining a synchronised display.
Export audio regions and annotation layers to external files.