Chris Cannam has announced version 3.1 of Sonic Visualiser, a free application for viewing and analyzing the contents of music audio files.

Sonic Visualiser 3.1

The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the first program you reach for when want to study a musical recording rather than simply listen to it.

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.

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v3.1

  • Add Plugins tab to Preferences dialog, from which you can review the plugin load paths and see which plugins were loaded from which locations, and also customise load paths (though the various path environment variables are still supported).
  • Stream the export of audio data and other CSV data so that very large exports don’t hang the UI or run us out of memory.
  • Ensure vertical scale appears for auto-align layers when there is nothing else to auto-align them to.
  • Fix another long-standing Windows-platform wide-char/utf8 conversion problem, with environment variable naming and contents.
  • Improve handling of incomplete session loads, i.e. situations where the audio files referred to by a session could not be found – previously the session could be re-saved immediately thus losing the audio reference; now at least we disable Save (enabling only Save As) and show a warning.
  • Update pane and layer menu shortcuts so that the waveform/spectrogram/etc shortcuts (Shift+G etc) operate on the source model in the currently-selected pane rather than the main model. This is a backward-incompatible change but is a far more intuitive way for the function to work.
  • Use dark background for bright colours in time-value/note/etc. layers as well as e.g. waveforms – this is how it was always “intended to” work, but it is a backward-incompatible change.
  • Make “Select All” select the whole span of everything that exists, not just the main model.
  • Add horizontal scale to Spectrum layer.
  • Improve spacing and labelling of vertical log scales.
  • Update build system for better Cap’n Proto version support and to use Repoint for code management in the repository.
  • Various other bug fixes.

Sonic Visualiser is available for download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

More information: Sonic Visualiser