Product Overview: Sonic Visualiser
Sonic Visualiser is a free, open-source, cross-platform desktop application designed for the analysis, visualisation, and annotation of music audio files. This powerful tool is tailored for musicians, musicologists, and audio engineers who need to delve deeply into the intricacies of audio data.
Key Features
Audio File Handling
Sonic Visualiser supports loading audio files in various formats, including WAV, AIFF, Ogg, Opus, and MP3. Users can view the waveforms of these files, providing a fundamental visual representation of the audio data.
Audio Visualisations
The application offers advanced audio visualisations such as spectrogram views, which can be interactively adjusted to customize display parameters. Spectrograms can be displayed in different modes, including a plain spectrogram for overall trends and a melodic range spectrogram to highlight musically meaningful features.
Annotation and Analysis
Users can annotate audio data by adding labelled time points, defining segments, point values, and curves. These annotations can be overlaid on top of waveform or spectrogram views, allowing for detailed analysis and comparison of different data sets. The application also supports importing annotation layers from various text file formats and MIDI files, enabling comprehensive integration of different types of data.
Automated Feature Extraction
Sonic Visualiser integrates with Vamp audio analysis plugins, which enable automated feature extraction using algorithms such as beat trackers, pitch detectors, onset detectors, and structural segmentation. This feature enhances the analytical capabilities by automatically calculating annotations based on the audio content.
Playback and Audition
The application allows for playback of the original audio along with synthesised annotations, ensuring synchronised playback with the display. Users can time-stretch playback, slowing down or speeding up the audio to a fraction or multiple of the original speed, and loop segments of interest seamlessly, even for non-contiguous areas.
Multi-Resolution and Layered Display
Sonic Visualiser enables viewing the same data at multiple time resolutions simultaneously, providing both close-up and overview perspectives. The interface supports multiple panes and layers, allowing users to stack different types of data (such as spectrograms, line data, and notes) on the same pane while maintaining alignment and magnification consistency.
Export and Remote Control
Users can export audio regions and annotation layers to external files, facilitating further analysis or integration with other tools. Additionally, Sonic Visualiser can be controlled remotely using the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol, if the support is compiled in.
Design Goals
- High-Quality Visualisations: Provide the best available core waveform and spectrogram visualisations for substantial music audio data.
- Comparative Analysis: Facilitate ready comparisons between different kinds of data by overlaying or displaying data in multiple ways.
- User-Friendly Interface: Ensure the user interface is straightforward, simpler to learn and explain than the internal data structures, resembling a consumer audio application.
- Performance: Be responsive, slick, and enjoyable, leveraging multithreading, multiprocessor, and multicore systems to handle large data sets efficiently.
In summary, Sonic Visualiser is a robust and flexible tool for audio analysis, offering a wide range of features that cater to the needs of both professionals and enthusiasts in the music and audio engineering fields. Its ability to handle large data sets, provide sophisticated visualisations, and integrate automated feature extraction makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working with music audio files.