Useful for both music lovers and audio engineers, Sonic Visualiser is an open-source application that offers you a wide variety of visualization options to help you analyze the components of nearly any audio file and check its quality. From the standard waveform graph and spectrum view to any of the various spectrograms provided, this high-end tool unveils with stunning detail all the subtleties of any audio file in a snap.
You can drag and drop any WAV, MP3, or Ogg audio file onto the program’s interface or open it by browsing to its location. By default, the app will show you a two-channel waveform graph of the selected file, which you can customize in terms of foreground and background colors, channels to display, size, etc. You can scroll and zoom the portion of the file you wish to visualize without losing track of where you are, as the entire audio file appears also as a waveform at the bottom side of the interface. This smaller representation of the whole file will always be there as a reference, regardless of the pane or panes you've selected.
That is one of the beauties of Sonic Visualiser – the possibility of combining various spectrograms and other visualization options in the same interface. This way, you can complement and combine your waveform graph with a plain spectrogram, a melodic range spectrogram, a spectrum, a peak frequency spectrogram, or all of them. You can resize the main interface window to accommodate as many panes as you require, and zoom and scroll them individually to highlight specific details. You can annotate your audio files using the various layers provided, which will let you add time points and even images to a specific section of the file for future reference. Likewise, you can export a certain audio region, together with all its layers, to an external file.
Sonic Visualiser supports Vamp plug-ins and has been designed to be of use to all types of users – from those who simply want to make sure that the wave files they have are truly lossless and not a bunch of MP3 transcodes, and for those who wish to analyze their audio data in depth. This open-source app works seamlessly with multi-processor and multi-core systems, thus making processes that traditionally take up a lot of processing and memory resources more computer-friendly. Your disk space, however, will pay the consequences, so be prepared.
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