Sonic Visualiser

Chris Cannam has released version 1.5 of Sonic Visualiser, an application for inspecting and analysing the contents of music audio files.

This release has a few new features and a substantial number of bug fixes over the previous version 1.4. Also, the binary packages for this release have been built with Qt 4.5 instead of 4.4, offering better performance and platform integration.

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v1.5

  • You can now insert time instants, time values, and notes using a MIDI device during playback. If a time value or note layer is current it will be used for insertion (giving a value equal to the pitch class, or the played note, respectively); otherwise an existing or new time instants layer will be used just as it is when inserting instants using the PC keyboard. Using a MIDI device should give better timing than using the PC keyboard.
  • There is a new Activity Log window with a (purely informative) list of events and user interactions that happen while SV is running.
  • The spectrogram has somewhat improved graphical scaling, and this is now the default (being much faster than the 4x oversampled method). The previous default is still available as a preference.
  • Visualisation of very dense colour plots (such as spectrograms calculated by plugins) is substantially faster in this release.
  • Spectrogram display is now faster in many circumstances.
  • Alignment using the MATCH plugin is faster on OS/X than before.
  • SV will take into account RDF plugin descriptions, if available, in order to make somewhat better decisions about display of plugin outputs (for example, placing segmentation data into a layer with segmentation plot type).
  • You can now switch layers by clicking on the spare area at the left end of the pane that is also used for the current pane indicator.
  • The vertical black lines dividing segments in the time value layer’s segmentation plot style are now optional.
  • Several widget layout bugs on OS/X have been fixed.
  • Several serious crashing, deadlock, and data corruption bugs have been fixed.

Sonic Visualiser is available as freeware (GNU license) for Linux, Mac and Windows.

More information: Sonic Visualiser