Centre for Digital Music has released Sonic Visualiser 3.0, an updated version of the free software suite for visual analysis of audio material.
The brand new 3.0 update of Sonic Visualiser comes with several major improvements compared to the previous versions of the software. Perhaps the most important new features are the ability to record audio, meaning that Sonic Visualiser can now be used to directly analyze the audio captured by your computer’s audio inputs. Other notable improvements include the ability to export vector graphics in SVG format, along with better support for high-resolution displays and extremely long audio files.
Apart from the newly introduced features mentioned above, Sonic Visualiser still has the ability to import WAV, OGG, and MP3 files, and display them visually as a waveform, spectrogram, or to perform key analysis (after installing the additional Vamp plugin). The program can also create annotations on top of the analyzed audio material. These can act as either section markers or be programmed to indicate beat or pitch events. In this new update, the annotations can also be imported/exported via various text file formats.
One interesting feature I was not expecting is a time-stretch function that can be set to gradually reduce or increase the speed of the loaded audio file. Of course, it is also possible to perform traditional “linear” time stratching. Another cool feature of Sonic Visualiser is its ability to use plugins to achieve custom analysis functionality not included in the base software. These “Vamp” plugins can be loaded from the official website, along with a selection of LADSPA and DSSI effects plugins which are also compatible with the software. Sonic Visualiser can be downloaded directly from the page linked below and works on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux-based systems.
Sonic Visualiser 3.0 is available for free download from the official website (17 MB download size, installer package, standalone application for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux).
