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

As well as a number of features designed to make exploring audio data as revealing and fun as possible, Sonic Visualiser also has powerful annotation capabilities to help you to describe what you find, and the ability to run automated annotation and analysis plugins in the new Vamp analysis plugin format.

Features:

• Load audio files in WAV, Ogg and MP3 formats, and view their waveforms.
• Look at audio visualisations such as spectrogram views, with interactive adjustment of display parameters.
• Annotate audio data by adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves.
• Overlay annotations on top of one another with aligned scales, and overlay annotations on top of waveform or spectrogram views.
• View the same data at multiple time resolutions simultaneously (for close-up and overview).
• Run feature-extraction plugins to calculate annotations automatically, using algorithms such as beat trackers, pitch detectors and so on.
• Import annotation layers from various text file formats.
• Import note data from MIDI files, view it alongside other frequency scales, and play it with the original audio.
• Play back the audio plus synthesised annotations, taking care to synchronise playback with display.
• Select areas of interest, optionally snapping to nearby feature locations, and audition individual and comparative selections in seamless loops.
• Time-stretch playback, slowing it down to as little as 10% of the original speed while retaining a synchronised display.
• Export audio regions and annotation layers to external files.

Note: Sonic Visualiser will only work on Pentium 4 and AMD64 processors.

What's New in version 1.7.1:

• The RDF importer does a better job of assigning labels to layers, layers to panes, and values to labelled regions
• Interactive editing in the Text layer benefits from the same improvements as made in 1.7 to Note and Region layers
• The layer data editor window has a text search feature
• The main window status bar now shows the last label to have passed the playback position in the current layer, at the right end of the status bar
• The Russian translation has been updated (thanks Alexandre)