Sonic Visualiser is a free, open-source application for Windows, Linux, and Mac, designed to be the first program you reach for when want to study a music recording closely. It's designed for musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers, and anyone else looking for a friendly way to look at what lies inside the audio file.
Sonic Visualiser is one of a family of four applications from the Centre for Digital Music:
Sonic Visualiser itself is the most general, a program for highly configurable detailed visualisation, analysis, and annotation of audio recordings.
Sonic Lineup is for rapid visualisation of multiple audio files containing versions of the same source material, such as performances from the same score, or different takes of an instrumental part.
Tony is for high quality pitch and note transcription for scientific applications, designed primarily for solo vocal recordings.
Sonic Annotator is a non-interactive command-line program application for batch audio feature extraction, using the same feature extraction plugins as Sonic Visualiser.
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Recent Releases
5.208 Mar 2025 15:25
minor bugfix:
Substantially improve responsiveness during scrolling and zooming.
With threaded repaints and various perceptual changes. This has the
Greatest effect on the Mac, where Sonic Visualiser was previously
Noticeably more sluggish than on other platforms. If threaded
Repaint causes instability, it can be disabled by setting the
SV_NO_THREADED_PAINT environment variable (to anything).
Habit of holding open the device microphone after recording.
- Improve compatibility with Vamp plugins that return unexpectedly.
Many values in features
- Improve compatibility with Vamp plugins that express units in.
Variant forms such as Hertz
Incorrect choice of UI language on systems with more than one
of the supported languages configured, and on which English that is.
Not explicitly regionalised to en_US or en_GB has a higher priority
Than any other supported language. Previously the first other
Matching language would have been used; now it will be en_US
5.0.114 Nov 2024 21:53
minor bugfix:
Occasional crashes in the Mac package, caused by a Qt, by. Updating the version of Qt used when packaging - in Preferences that prevented some of the analysis settings. From taking effect Failure to load some older 32-bit Windows Vamp plugins. - Update UI translation loading logic to better reflect system locale. Settings
4.227 Jun 2020 18:45
minor feature:
4.131 Mar 2020 15:25
minor feature:
4.0.117 Feb 2020 10:38
minor feature:
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