Version 3.0 of Sonic Visualiser, a free application for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files, is now available.
As of the release of version 3.0 in March 2017, Sonic Visualiser has been continuously developed and maintained in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London for about a decade.
This release is one of the most substantial updates the application has ever had. In addition to several new features, it includes a number of technical changes to core functions that should enable them to maintain a modern and useful application in the years to come.
Some new features you might like:
- Audio recording. As well as working with local and online audio files, you can now record from the microphone or other audio inputs directly into Sonic Visualiser. The choice of audio device for both recording and playback can be changed in the Preferences.
- Retina and Hi-DPI support. Previous versions had only limited support for retina or other very high-resolution displays. This release provides complete retina-resolution layer rendering on the Mac, and proper scaling and display of UI elements with high-resolution displays on other platforms.
- SVG export. You can now export layers in the scalable SVG image format as well as PNG.
- Improved support for very long audio files. Sonic Visualiser can now handle files longer than 232 sample frames. This applies to 64-bit builds only, but for the first time ever, the default build for Windows is a 64-bit one (other platforms had 64-bit builds already in previous releases).
- New colour scales and normalisations, with new colour scale default settings in the Preferences.
Behind the scenes there has been a major overhaul in many areas of rendering, plugin transform, and audio and file handling code. This release is also substantially more robust in its handling of Vamp audio analysis plugins than previous versions. It should now be impossible for an incompatible or crashing Vamp plugin to crash Sonic Visualiser with it. Also, the 64-bit Windows build is now able to load both 32-bit and 64-bit plugins, making it compatible with all the existing 32-bit Vamp plugins available for download.
There are a few more features and various bug fixes in this release as well, which you can find listed in the CHANGELOG file.
