{.imagelink}Sonic Visualiser from Queen Mary’s is yet another software tool for visualizing audio content. However, there are some features that stand out:
- Cross-platform: available for OS X, Linux, Windows
- GPL’ed
- Native support for aiff, wav, mp3 and ogg (but what about AAC?)
- Annotations: Support for adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves. The annotations can be overlayed on top of waveforms and spectrograms
- Time-stretch
Vamp Plugins is at the core of the Sonic Visualiser, and it seems like they want this to become a standard for non-realtime audio plugins. This seems like a good idea, and it will be interesting to see how this develops.
I have just briefly tested it, and it has not crashed yet (which is a good sign). It is not particularly fast on my PowerBook, but at least it is multi-threaded so it doesn’t freeze while doing the analysis.
For more advanced analysis, editing, and sdif export, I still prefer SPEAR.