Sonic Visualiser

News and Release Notes

News and release notes for Sonic Visualiser, Sonic Lineup, Tony, and Sonic Annotator.

31st July 2024 — Sonic Visualiser v5.0 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v5.0 since the previous release 4.5.2:

• Port to Qt6. The code now builds only with Qt6, and Qt5 is no longer supported
• Add mechanism to ignore plugins on subsequent runs if they fail to load, and to review ignored plugins from the preferences dialog
• Add Mel scale to the options for vertical spectrogram scale
• Add an opaque toggle to the spectrogram; switching it off gives spectrograms some transparency, so they can be overlaid over other layers, including other spectrograms
• Update opaque toggle in colour 3d layers so that it works like the new one in the spectrogram. Previously colour 3d plot layers could be translucent at low resolutions but not at higher ones; now the setting affects all resolutions. Correspondingly make it default to off, as in the spectrogram
• Add smoothing toggle directly to spectrogram parameters, like the one already found in colour 3d plot layers. Previously spectrogram smoothing could be toggled only from the preferences
• Stop snapping spectrogram frequency range to bin frequencies. This already-confusing feature caused problems with the new support for translucent spectrograms, which permits overlaying spectrograms of differing bin counts that would be too hard to line up properly if the frequency extents were always snapped to the nearest bin
• Clarify keyboard and mouse shortcut descriptions in the Key And Mouse Reference window, especially for the platform-specific descriptions used on the Mac, and add a few more alternative shortcuts including more standard zoom in/out shortcuts
• Fix disappearing peaks in peak-bin display mode in the spectrogram, caused by overzealous smoothing
• Fix jumps in spectrogram when changing zoom level between certain values in hi-dpi pixel-doubled situations, caused by a failure of cache invalidation
• Fix some very slow spectrogram painting
• Fix disappearance of right-button Transforms menu after file load
• Fix inconsistent default vs set threshold values in spectrogram
• Fix crash on painting very low-resolution dense 3d plots

3rd May 2023 — Sonic Visualiser v4.5.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.5.2 since the previous release 4.5.1:

• Support multi-line text labels on time instants
• Improve refresh and rendering of text labels in various layers
• Improve abbreviation of layer names in the key at bottom-right of a pane
• Fix repeated writes to settings file when rendering time-ruler layers at close zoom levels
• Use system Vamp host SDK if provided

7th November 2022 — Sonic Visualiser v4.5.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.5.1 since the previous release 4.5:

• Update to use Rubber Band v3 with its higher quality timestretcher (the older, lower-CPU one is still available in preferences). This means the build requires rubberband-3.0.0 or newer, so you may need to install it separately if building on an older system.
• Fix inability to select Hz as the unit of a layer following import
• Provisional fix to bailing out on startup when invoked with "Open With..." on Mac
• Fix nonsense display when showing frequency scaled points with value of 0Hz

31st March 2022 — Sonic Visualiser v4.5 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.5 since the previous release 4.4:

• Add option to switch off the interpolation used in the waveform view for zoom levels closer than one pixel per frame: sometimes it can be an unnecessary distraction. With interpolation switched off, the individual samples are shown as unconnected points instead
• Make it possible to toggle segment colouring in the segmentation view of the time value layer, as well as toggling segment division lines
• When importing CSV files, if a column heading indicates a likely unit for the column, use it by default; also remember last user settings for the import dialog
• Ensure the Choose Default Template option on the templates menu can be reached even when no file is loaded
• Give the spectrum layer the same effective scale range as it had before the dB scale fix in v4.4, fixing the accidental halving of the visible range for that layer in v4.4
• Fix hang when opening two plugin parameter dialogs at once
• Fix crash when rendering slice or spectrum layers scrolled to earlier than the start of the audio or later than the end
• Fix crash when more than one audio file is supplied at the command line with a default session template that requires regenerating one or more feature extraction layers and layer generation produces an error or warning
• Fix failure to exit fully if the window is closed before plugin scan is complete at startup

17th September 2021 — Sonic Visualiser v4.4 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.4 since the previous release 4.3:

• Update Mac build to add support for Apple M1 (arm64) architecture: the official package is now a universal binary app, and the arm64 slice can use both (existing) x86_64 and (future) arm64 Vamp plugins
• Fix long-standing idiosycratic choice of dB scale, so as to conform to conventional usage for root-power quantities. That is, dB values for audio signals are now 20 x log10 rather than 10 x log10. Power and power-like signals (where units are available) remain 10 x log10
• Fix time lag between visual position of playback pointer and actual audio played, particularly when playing files resampled from one rate to another
• When recording audio into an empty session with an active session template that includes one or more plugin transforms, re-run the transforms when recording finishes, instead of only when the recorded model is first created (so as to get proper results for the full recording)
• Fix failure to re-run transforms when loading a session or template before the initial plugin scan has completed
• Fix misalignment and potential crash when rendering 3d plots with variant sample rates
• Change interpretation of modifiers (shift/alt) for the mouse scroll-wheel, and the documentation for them, so as to be consistent with one another and with other contexts

18th January 2021 — Sonic Visualiser v4.3 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.3 since the previous release 4.2:

• Fix failure to activate the Align button on startup, even when the appropriate alignment plugin is installed
• Fix (obviously) incorrect colour display for closely zoomed-in colour 3d plot views
• Switch the build system from autoconf/qmake/make to meson/ninja

18th August 2020 — Sonic Lineup v1.1 released

Changes in Sonic Lineup v1.1 since the previous release 1.1:

• Add an Alignment menu allowing you to choose one of a set of alignment methods, including new sung-notes alignment and an option for an external program that you supply
• Add a subsequence alignment option for cases where the "other" tracks represent only fragments of the "reference"
• Improve display of alignment views in cases where two adjacent tracks overlap each other in time only partially or not at all
• Improve selection of font sizes and pane sizing, especially when many tracks are loaded
• Speed up re-opening the application with many tracks in session
• If alignment fails for all tracks because of some external factor, show the failure report dialog once only instead of for every track

14th August 2020 — Sonic Visualiser v4.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.2 since the previous release 4.1:

• Speed up startup, especially on Windows and especially when a lot of plugins are installed. Plugins are now scanned after the main window has been displayed, and the Transform menus are populated dynamically when the results are available.
• Fix incompatibility of 64-bit Windows build with Windows 7

18th June 2020 — Sonic Visualiser v4.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.1 since the previous release 4.0.1:

• Support "dark mode" on Windows and Linux as well as macOS
• Add right-click (or Ctrl-click, on the Mac) context menus to the layer property tabs, pane zoom controls, and all dial controls, providing some basic edit and reset functions
• Provide format options when exporting layers to CSV, allowing control over column separator, header row, and timestamp format
• Permit and handle optional header row when importing from CSV
• Add export of spectrogram data to CSV formats
• Support doubling escapes for quotes in quoted CSV fields on import
• Fix truncated image export when exporting from spectrogram view that hasn't finished loading when the export is requested
• Fix failure to show parameter updates when changing the current program in a Vamp plugin that supports programs (e.g. Melodia)
• Fix inability of Windows builds to open https:// URLs
• Add references to Vamp Plugin Pack in "Find a Transform" results for plugins that are not yet installed but are available in pack
• Improve and tidy various aspects of OSC support, and update documentation for it
• Improve performance of peak-frequency spectrogram
• Fix missing undo/redo of layer renames
• Fix failure to audition effects plugins live, while adjusting their parameters in preparation for applying them - this worked in some cases, but not the most common ones; it should now work everywhere

9th June 2020 — Sonic Annotator v1.6 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.6 since the previous release 1.5:

Front-end changes:

• Add support for reading the Opus audio codec on all platforms
• Add support for reading WMA and AAC formats on 64-bit Windows. (AAC was already supported on macOS.) Note that AAC support on Windows is not "gapless", i.e. the decoder provides no way to identify and remove the encoder gap at the start of the stream, so timings will vary between Windows and Mac. For this reason, like mp3, AAC should not be used as a file format of record
• Add warning to the help text about avoiding mp3 and AAC as file format of record

Build changes:

• General updates to dependency libraries and build system following changes to the rest of the Sonic Visualiser family code since v1.5 appeared

10th December 2019 — Sonic Visualiser v4.0.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.0.1 since the previous release 4.0:

• Fix nonsense vertical scale in NoteLayer when displaying a model with non-Hz scale (e.g. from an analysis plugin that outputs MIDI note values)
• Fix failure to open playback device when using macOS Catalina with certain audio devices
• Fix failure to make installed executables executable when compiling and installing the source package

10th December 2019 — Tony v2.1.1 released

Changes in Tony 2.1.1 since the previous release 2.1:

• Fix incorrect note numbering in display
• Fix incorrect state of "Penalise Soft Pitches" option in Analysis menu. Previously this was displayed as if enabled, but the option was not actually active when performing the analysis, until the option was toggled or "Reset Options to Default" was used
• Fix failure to open playback device when using macOS Catalina with certain audio devices
• Remove dependency on JACK in Linux deb package: the application can use it if available, but it isn't required
• Fix failure to make installed executables executable when installing from the source package

10th December 2019 — Sonic Lineup v1.0.1 released

Changes in Sonic Lineup v1.0.1 since the previous release 1.0:

• Fix salient features disappearing as the view scrolls
• Fix failure to open playback device when using macOS Catalina with certain audio devices
• Remove dependency on JACK in Linux deb package: the application can use it if available, but it isn't required
• Fix failure to make installed executables executable when installing from the source package

25th October 2019 — Sonic Visualiser v4.0 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v4.0 since the previous release 3.3:

• Add Box annotation layer type, typically used for time-frequency boxes to be annotated over a spectrogram. Because this introduces a new layer type into the session file format, the major version number has been bumped to v4.0. Sessions saved from v4.0 can still be opened in earlier versions of Sonic Visualiser, but any Box layers will not be loaded
• Fix behaviour of auto-align layers on top of waveform: they can now be aligned in the vertical scale, if they have a unit of V and the waveform is of a single channel in linear or dB mode
• Make the UI more readable in macOS "dark mode"
• Fix sluggishness in starting and stopping playback when using PulseAudio v13.0+

25th October 2019 — Tony v2.1 released

Changes in Tony 2.1 since the previous release 2.0:

• Fix problems reopening session files
• Add support for reading the Opus audio codec on all platforms
• Add support for WMA and AAC formats on 64-bit Windows. (AAC was already supported on macOS.) Note that AAC support on Windows does not support "gapless" import, i.e. removing the encoder gaps at start and end of the stream
• Fix sluggishness in starting and stopping playback when using PulseAudio v13.0+
• Update platform builds with newer libraries and updated platform support

25th October 2019 — Sonic Lineup v1.0 released

Changes in Sonic Lineup v1.0 since the previous release 0.3:

• Add ghost reference trace to Sung Pitch view for comparison with pitch of reference
• Add first-run explainer dialog
• Improve rendering of alignment views between panes
• Fix performance problem when switching to spectrogram mode with numerous tracks open, especially on Windows
• Merge major and minor key plots, because of lack of vertical space
• Fix problems with presentation and alignment of vertical scales
• Fix ffwd/rewind which could get stuck when used in aligned views
• Fix incorrect waveform type selection when switching modes, and ensure outline waveform always uses the same waveform configuration
• Fix a number of crashes and thread-safety issues
• Fix sluggishness in starting and stopping playback when using PulseAudio v13.0+

14th June 2019 — Sonic Lineup v0.3 released

Changes in Sonic Lineup v0.3:

• First public release
• First build under this name

21st May 2019 — Sonic Visualiser v3.3 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser v3.3 since the previous release 3.2.1:

• Add support for reading the Opus audio codec on all platforms
• Add support for WMA and AAC formats on 64-bit Windows. (AAC was already supported on macOS.) Note that AAC support on Windows does not support "gapless" import, i.e. removing the encoder gaps at start and end of the stream
• Add ability to choose the field separator when importing CSV and CSV-like files, if more than one possible candidate separator is found in the file
• Fix crash when closing session or starting a new session while calculating alignment of multiple audio files
• Fix crash when running certain plugins that call for frequency-domain input at non-power-of-two block sizes
• Fix wandering left edge of measure-tool rectangle while dragging out the area
• Ensure that plugin stderr debug output is logged to the SV log file

7th January 2019 — Sonic Visualiser v3.2.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.2.1 since the previous release 3.2:

• Fix failure to record from built-in microphone on macOS 10.14 (caused by lack of microphone permission request text)
• Fix crash when closing SV or starting a new session during recording
• Fix crash on exit in some builds that disable OSC support
• Fix flashing effect when scrolling certain configurations of colour 3d plot layer leftwards

7th December 2018 — Sonic Visualiser v3.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.2 since the previous release 3.1.1:

• Add ability to zoom closer than one sample per pixel, so as to see the interpolated signal level between samples
• Add oversampling control to the spectrogram and spectrum layers
• Highlight and label frequency peaks in the spectrum as the mouse rolls over them, when enabled in the parameter area
• Add feature to convert and import audio from a CSV data file
• Add some new colour maps, and restore the old Blue on Black one
• Speed up spectrum rendering at high resolutions
• Fix failure to pass Nyquist bins correctly to frequency-domain-input Vamp plugins in some circumstances
• Fix sometimes incorrect shortcut associations for new-layer menu items
• Various other rendering improvements and bug fixes

14th August 2018 — Sonic Visualiser v3.1.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.1.1 since the previous release 3.1:

• Fix failure to record correctly into an empty session with certain audio drivers
• Fix failure to run LADSPA plugins at all, except with some unusual path layouts
• Fix failure to silence sonified notes when rewinding backwards or jumping back from a loop endpoint
• Fix macOS .dmg image so as to use older HFS+ filesystem for compatibility

14th July 2018 — Sonic Visualiser v3.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.1 since the previous release 3.0.3:

• Add Plugins tab to Preferences dialog, from which you can review the plugin load paths and see which plugins were loaded from which locations, and also customise load paths (though the various path environment variables are still supported)
• Stream the export of audio data and other CSV data so that very large exports don't hang the UI or run us out of memory (thanks to Lucas Thompson)
• Ensure vertical scale appears for auto-align layers when there is nothing else to auto-align them to
• Fix another long-standing Windows-platform wide-char/utf8 conversion problem, with environment variable naming and contents
• Improve handling of incomplete session loads, i.e. situations where the audio files referred to by a session could not be found - previously the session could be re-saved immediately thus losing the audio reference; now at least we disable Save (enabling only Save As) and show a warning
• Update pane and layer menu shortcuts so that the waveform/spectrogram/etc shortcuts (Shift+G etc) operate on the source model in the currently-selected pane rather than the main model. This is a backward-incompatible change but is a far more intuitive way for the function to work
• Use dark background for bright colours in time-value/note/etc layers as well as e.g. waveforms - this is how it was always "intended to" work, but it is a backward-incompatible change
• Make "Select All" select the whole span of everything that exists, not just the main model
• Add horizontal scale to Spectrum layer
• Improve spacing and labelling of vertical log scales
• Update build system for better Cap'n Proto version support and to use Repoint for code management in the repository
• Various other bug fixes

25th May 2017 — Sonic Visualiser v3.0.3 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.0.3 since the previous release 3.0.2:

• Improve decisions about where and how to label vertical scales
• Update build support material and documentation to reflect the official release of Cap'n Proto 0.6 (which we can now use rather than depending on git builds)

25th May 2017 — Sonic Annotator v1.5 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.5 since the previous release 1.4:

Front-end changes:

• Change mp3 file loading so as to compensate for encoder/decoder delay and padding (using "gapless playback" logic). While this is a real improvement, unfortunately it does mean that the initial padding in mp3 file load has changed from previous versions, which may change alignment of features based on mp3 files relative to those generated by previous versions. It's not a great idea to use mp3 as a file format of record, because of differences like this between decoders
• Add --transform-minversion flag to test for available version of a plugin transform
• Add quiet mode (-q)

Bug fixes:

• Fix possible crash in multiplexed file handling (--multiplex, -m)
• Fix nominal rounding error (out by 1ns) in output under some conditions

25th March 2017 — Sonic Visualiser v3.0.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.0.2 since the previous release 3.0.1:

• Fix crash when changing parameters for spectrum view
• Fix incorrect measure tool crosshairs in spectrum view
• Update Russian and Czech UI translations (thanks to Alexandre Prokoudine and Pavel Fric respectively)

12th March 2017 — Sonic Visualiser v3.0.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.0.1 since the previous release 3.0:

• Fix crashes with MIDI devices and speedup/slowdown control on Windows
• Update MIDI input driver layer

7th March 2017 — Sonic Visualiser v3.0 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 3.0 since the previous release 2.5:

• Add ability to record audio, and ability to change the audio device for playback or recording in the preferences
• Add complete support for high-resolution (Hi-DPI or retina) displays, including for layer data rendering as well as UI controls and icons. This makes the biggest difference when using a retina Mac, on which previous versions did not render layer data at retina resolution, but it also improves scaling and rendering of UI elements on Hi-DPI displays on Windows and Linux
• Add ability to export scalable (SVG) image files
• Run plugins in a separate process, so that if a plugin crashes, it no longer brings down Sonic Visualiser with it. In every other respect the behaviour should be unchanged
• Scan plugins on startup in a separate process, and report on any that crash or won't load
• Add ability to open, display, and analyse very long audio files (of more than 2^32 sample frames)
• Change mp3 file loading so as to compensate for encoder/decoder delay and padding (using "gapless playback" logic). While this is a real improvement, unfortunately it does mean that the initial padding in mp3 file load has changed from previous versions, which may mean some sessions saved in previous versions are no longer correctly aligned. It's not a great idea to use mp3 as a file format of record, because of differences like this between decoders. The previous behaviour is still available as a preference.
• Add new Hybrid normalisation type for spectrogram and colour 3d plot layers. This normalises each column to its peak value and then scales the normalised values by the log of the peak in order to restore some distinction in scale between columns with different levels. It can provide quite visually clear results.
• Add function to subdivide time instant layers into regular intervals (and its inverse)
• Add new preference for default colour scales
• Add a basic ability to zoom (in the frequency axis) to the spectrum
• Switch to using combined level/pan controls in layer property boxes and for the main volume control
• Make CSV file reader better able to handle files with varying numbers of columns
• Fix a number of problems on Windows with loading and saving some file formats to filenames not representable in system codepage
• Add "What's New" dialog
• Finally switch the Windows build to 64-bit by default (with adapters to run either 32- or 64-bit plugins)

18th March 2016 — Sonic Annotator v1.4 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.4 since the previous release 1.3:

Front-end changes:

• Better error reporting, especially for invalid transform files and transform-not-found
• Avoid crashing out when a single plugin (that is not being used) can't be loaded because of e.g. an undefined symbol

Bug fixes:

• Fix (with test) horrible crash with --multiplex option
• Fix erroneous quantization to 16 bits for coded file types of greater bit depth
• Fix multiple outputs when requesting both summary and non-summary for the same output

5th November 2015 — Sonic Annotator v1.3 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.3 since the previous release 1.2:

Back-end (feature writer) changes:

• Add the --csv-digits, --lab-digits, and --jams-digits options to control the number of significant figures printed for feature values
• Update the JAMS writer to JAMS 0.2.0 format
• Show a more useful error message when user provides a filename instead of a transform id to the -d option (happened to me when cut-and-pasting command lines and I was quite baffled at first)

23rd October 2015 — Sonic Visualiser v2.5 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.5 since the previous release 2.4.1:

• Add unit-converter dialog, for converting between various pitch and timing units
• Fix failure to reload note layers from session file
• Use a more sensible scale for the play-speed dial
• Fix crash when importing very wide CSV files
• Fix generation of wrong layer type from some CSV files
• Fix failure to export last instant in a time-instant layer

23rd October 2015 — Tony v2.0 released

Changes in Tony 2.0 since the previous release 1.0:

• Tony now has a Record button, allowing you to record audio from the microphone and analyse it
• Graphical rendering and icons now properly support hi-dpi/Retina displays
• The playback speed dial uses a more sensible scale

1st September 2015 — Sonic Annotator v1.2 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.2 since the previous release 1.1:

Front-end changes:

• Add the --segments-from option, providing the ability to read segment boundaries from a file

Back-end (feature writer) changes:

• Rename the JSON feature writer to JAMS. There may be other JSON formats supported in future

Bug fixes:

• Fix invalid JSON written by JAMS feature writer for dense features
• Fix invalid UTF-8 output from RDF feature writer when processing MP3 files having ID3 tags in non-ASCII, non-UTF8 encodings

1st April 2015 — Tony v1.0 released

Changes in Tony 1.0 since the previous release 0.6:

• The underlying pYin analysis plugin has been updated; more analysis options are available
• Notes can be dragged up and down using the mouse in edit mode. When you drag a note, the pitch track underneath it snaps to the nearest spectral peaks (if any are found). Releasing the note makes the note snap back to the (possibly now moved) underlying pitch values.
• Exported pitch track CSV files now contain one row for every processing frame in the file, and those with no identified pitch have the pitch recorded as 0. This is useful for some evaluation and post-processing tools, and it's easier to filter out the 0 values if you don't need them than add them afterwards if you do
• Exported note track CSV files now omit the (meaningless, in this context) velocity column
• Level and pan for a layer (audio, pitch track, notes) are now shown in a little matrix widget, which is quicker to read than the previous pair of rotary dials; click on it to pop up an editable version
• Horizontal scrolling using a Mac trackpad now works properly
• Tony now finds plugins in its own installation directory by default (can be overridden with TONY_VAMP_PATH environment variable)
• Bug fixes

16th October 2014 — Sonic Annotator v1.1 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.1 since the previous release 1.0:

Front-end changes:

• Add support for the start time and duration properties of a transform, applying a plugin to only a range of the input audio
• Reduce the internal processing blocksize from 16384 to 1024 samples to reduce extent of time rounding at end of file or range
• Add --multiplex option to compose multiple audio files into a single multi-channel stream with one input file per channel
• Add --normalise to request each audio file be normalised to 1.0 max
• Add support for the plugin_version property of a transform, causing Sonic Annotator to refuse to run with the wrong version of a plugin
• Add --minversion option to permit scripts to check that the version of Sonic Annotator is as they expect
• Add new housekeeping options to list the available feature writers and supported audio file formats
• Pull out the feature-writer-specific help text into separate help options (-h ) as the help was getting too long

Back-end (feature writer) changes:

• Add --csv-omit-filename, --csv-end-times, and --csv-fill-ends options to the CSV feature writer to adjust various aspects of its output
• Add "json" feature writer, exporting to JAMS (JSON Annotated Music Specification) format. This writer is provisional and is expected to change in future releases to comply more effectively with the specification
• Add "midi" feature writer, exporting to MIDI files
• Add "lab" feature writer, exporting to tab-separated label files. (This is equivalent to using the CSV writer with a tab separator and the new --csv-omit-filename and --csv-end-times options, but it's simpler to use if .lab is what you want)

Bug fixes:

• Fix the former habit of forging ahead even if not all transform files could be found or parsed (this may have been intentional behaviour but it is confusing more than it is useful)
• Fix failure to support --summary-only flag when reading transforms with summaries from a transform file

1st October 2014 — Sonic Visualiser v2.4.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.4.1 since the previous release 2.4:

• Fix a crash when rendering certain colour 3d plot layers

1st September 2014 — Sonic Visualiser v2.4 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.4 since the previous release 2.3:

• Add support for left/right scrolling using a two-finger touchpad gesture (where available)
• Make the octave numbering into a configurable option, and change the default. Previously Sonic Visualiser labelled middle-C as "C3"; now it labels middle-C as "C4", a more common standard in the world outside MIDI sequencer software. The previous system is available as an option in the Preferences. This affects only the visible labels: there is no change to analysis or to the file format
• Sonify time-value layers. Any time-value curve whose scale unit is set to Hz will now acquire a playback toggle control; this control is off by default, but if it is switched on, the curve will be played back using a variable-frequency sound generator
• Add support for playback of note layers with non-MIDI frequencies (formerly the note playback was limited to exact MIDI pitch)
• Change the default playback sample for note layers from piano to an electric piano with sustain. The piano sample is still available, and any sessions saved using it should continue to use it
• Add a cancel button for Vamp plugin processing: currently, cancelling a transform results in a part-complete layer rather than removing the results
• Add keyboard shortcuts to cycle the current layer (in addition to the existing ones to cycle the current pane)
• Fix various bugs related to layer ordering: layer tabs re-ordering themselves randomly when new layer added, layers being ordered randomly when saving and reloading a session
• Fix incorrect interaction with non-Unicode usernames when creating temporary and template directories on Windows
• Shade the start and end of the main audio file, to make them easier to see for files that start or end in silence
• Speed up rendering and scrolling in time-value layers
• Make it possible to import CSV files directly into Note layers by adding Pitch as a data type in the CSV file import dialog
• Fix play pointer jump to wrong frame when clicking on row in the layer edit dialog
• Fix problems with keyboard shortcuts when using Qt5 on OS/X. This is the first release in which the official builds use Qt5 for all platforms.

16th June 2014 — Tony v0.6 released

Changes in Tony 0.6 since the previous release 0.5:

• The play pointer no longer tracks to the centre of the main pane when dragging, and is now always visible. Play pointer / playhead behaviour is generally expected to be much more sensible and intuitive in this release than in prior ones
• Many keyboard shortcuts have been added and improved, including the shortcuts for incremental note-by-note selection and moving the play pointer
• Audio files are now implicitly normalised to peak == 1.0 when loading
• Tony now has an Analysis menu which contains various configuration settings that affect pitch analysis
• There is now an option to save the session directly to the same directory as the original audio file, for rapid saving when annotating many audio files in sequence
• The extents of the "active" note are now more clearly shown when mousing over the note track
• There is a new function to delete the notes (without deleting pitch measurements) within the selection
• Numerous bug fixes

3rd April 2014 — Tony v0.5 released

Changes in Tony 0.5 since the previous release 0.4:

• The start and end of the recording are now shaded in grey so you can see where they are
• There are new save/open session functions on the File menu; the session file extension is .ton, and save/open session should work
• The note edit tool (which was largely broken in 0.4 after lots of work on pitch track editing) now works again
• New note editing menu actions: split note, merge notes, form note from selection, snap notes to pitch track
• Editing the pitch track (when notes are present) causes the notes to be automatically updated to the new pitch track
• The Key and Mouse Reference help window has been updated so as to show Tony-specific actions properly
• The undo/redo command bundling has been tidied up and some related crashes fixed

12th March 2014 — Tony v0.4 released

Changes in Tony 0.4 since the previous release 0.3:

• The main pitch tracker (pYIN) now uses a non-FFT Yin method in order to produce unbiased timestamps
• Pitch estimation within a constrained frequency range now uses a harmonic spectrum plugin (CHP) that tracks peaks within the range in a way more in line with user expectations than pYIN
• The layer show/hide controls have been merged into the layer type icons, saving toolbar space
• Adjustment of the displayed frequency range has been crudely added
• Fix crash on loading a second file and inability to export pitch track after using selection strip

6th March 2014 — Tony v0.3 released

Changes in Tony 0.3 since the previous release 0.2:

• Key shortcuts for editing have been revised to be more consistent on OS/X and across different Qt versions
• Reduce visual clutter in selection areas
• Fixes to OS/X deployment

5th March 2014 — Tony v0.2 released

Changes in Tony 0.2 since the previous release 0.1:

• Waveform is now displayed in a shadow layer at bottom of main pane
• A selection strip has been added at the bottom of the window, so selections can be made without changing tool mode
• Double-click in selection strip now selects a region associated with a single note
• Pitches can be moved up and down by octaves, and to different pitch candidates, within the selected area
• Cancelling a selection by hitting Esc restores the pre-selection pitch track
• A frequency range can be selected with shift-click in the main window to prompt the pitch tracker to run only within that range
• Arbitrary-frequency playback and pitch track resynthesis now supported
• Layers can now be hidden, and playback toggled, individually, and there are now gain and pain controls for each playable layer type

12th December 2013 — Sonic Visualiser v2.3 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.3 since the previous release 2.2:

• Add a startup welcome dialog that also explains what SV makes network connections for and allows user to forbid them
• Add "Export Audio Data" feature
• Show piano keyboard scale in note and time-value layers as well as spectrogram, where vertical scale is log Hz; also show numerical scale in note and region layers when not auto-aligned
• Speed up CSV file import and avoid showing crazily wide window for CSV file format dialog when file has lots of columns
• Fix incorrectly saved window geometry when exiting from maximised state
• Reduce number of timer wakeups when idle
• Add American English translation and make choice of translation into a preference (defaulting to system locale)
• Permit installation to non-default location with Windows installer build

31st July 2013 — Sonic Visualiser v2.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.2 since the previous release 2.1:

• Build with support for hidpi ("retina") text on OS/X
• Fix very slow analysis when using Ogg or FLAC files decoded via libsndfile
• Fix inaccurate scale auto-align between time-value layers and others
• Fix failure to open files specified on command line (or via Open With) on Windows
• Reset cyclical counters and switch back to navigate mode when a new session is started

16th May 2013 — Sonic Visualiser v2.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.1 since the previous release 2.0.1:

• Fix incorrect handling of FixedSampleRate outputs (Vamp SDK fix)
• Make it easier to see results from transforms that return a single point
• Make labelling clearer on time-value layers
• Add discrete-curve mode for time-value layers (for curves with gaps)
• Update code to build against Qt5

9th May 2013 — Sonic Annotator v1.0 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 1.0 since the previous release 0.7:

Bug fixes:

• Fix incorrect samplerate in reading m4a files on OS/X
• Fix incorrect handling of FixedSampleRate outputs (Vamp SDK fix)
• Add tests that use the Vamp test plugin

7th March 2013 — Sonic Visualiser v2.0.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.0.1 since the previous release 2.0:

• Fix incorrect samplerate in reading m4a files on OS/X

17th July 2012 — Sonic Annotator v0.7 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 0.7 since the previous release 0.6:

Build changes:

• Support 64-bit builds on OS/X (using CoreAudio instead of obsolete QuickTime audio file reader)
• Simplify RDF reading and fix some bugs. Now requires Dataquay (http://breakfastquay.com/dataquay/) rather than using Redland directly. Release builds use Sord/Serd rather than Redland

16th July 2012 — Sonic Visualiser v2.0 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 2.0 since the previous release 1.9:

• Support 64-bit builds on OS/X (using CoreAudio instead of obsolete QuickTime audio file reader)
• Simplify RDF reading and fix some bugs. Now requires Dataquay (http://breakfastquay.com/dataquay/) rather than using Redland directly. Release builds use Sord/Serd rather than Redland
• Add a fullscreen mode on the F11 key

10th October 2011 — Sonic Visualiser v1.9 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.9 since the previous release 1.8:

• Add session templates; save session as template; apply template to session
• Tidy up the file open logic so as to remove the dialog asking how to open a file, where possible
• Various bug fixes.

28th September 2011 — Sonic Annotator v0.6 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 0.6 since the previous release 0.5:

Build changes:

• Switch to modular SV-libraries build using svcore library
• We now require Vamp plugin SDK v2.3
• Add autoconf configure script

Front-end changes:

• Pick up default sample rate and channel count from the first audio file, where not specified in the transform, instead of using hard coded defaults
• Make it possible to specify the window shape in transform
• Fix the --csv-one-file option which did not work in 0.5
• Fix --force option when using playlists
• Add -v option to print version number and exit

8th April 2011 — Sonic Visualiser v1.8 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.8 since the previous release 1.7.2:

• Sonic Visualiser now registers as a file type handler on OS/X, providing better integration with the desktop generally (thanks to Dan Stowell)
• There is a new function to toggle all Time Rulers at once (key #)
• The CSV import dialog has been overhauled, allowing more flexible selection of purpose for each column
• Text overlays are now easier to read on dark backgrounds
• Hidden layers are now ignored when exporting an image (thanks to Dan Stowell)
• A crash when starting a new session or exiting the application after loading a session with saved alignment data has been fixed
• The duplication of right-button menu functions when multiple files were loaded has been fixed
• The layer-add menu functions now have shortcuts (thanks to Dan Stowell)
• The codebase has been reorganised into libraries and a configure step added. It should be easier to build and maintain on OS/X and Linux than previously, although it won't make much difference on Windows.
• A Czech translation is now included (thanks to Pavel Fric).

26th May 2010 — Sonic Annotator v0.5 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 0.5 since the previous release 0.4:

Build changes:

• Remove unused audioio library and avoid its dependencies

Front-end changes:

• Avoid leaking file descriptors on exceptions
• Fix embarrassing bug that caused failure to mix down to mono properly for single-channel plugins with multi-channel input files
• Fail sooner if the output file is not writable (i.e. don't wait until the first data is available for writing)

5th May 2010 — Sonic Visualiser v1.7.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.7.2 since the previous release 1.7.1:

• The time-value layer now has an origin line and an option to show derivatives (change from one point to the next) rather than raw values
• A static initialiser race has been fixed, possibly fixing an occasional crash on startup in Windows
• A crash when pressing Play straight after New Session has been fixed

22nd October 2009 — Sonic Visualiser v1.7.1 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.7.1 since the previous release 1.7:

• 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)

25th September 2009 — Sonic Annotator v0.4 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 0.4 since the previous release 0.3:

Build changes:

• Sonic Annotator now requires the Vamp plugin SDK v2.1 or newer.

Front-end changes:

• Frequency-domain plugins now use the PluginInputDomainAdapter's new ShiftData processing method, ensuring that the first block received by the plugin is the one centred on 0 rather than starting at 0. Unfortunately, the old behaviour omitted a timing compensation step, and this fix actually changes the results from some plugin processes: the previous behaviour was not always in line with the Vamp plugin specification.
• More useful diagnostics are now available when a plugin fails to load or run.

CSV back-end (feature writer) changes:

• The CSV writer now closes its output files properly when it finishes writing to each one, rather than leaving them all open until the end and risk running out of file descriptors. This was already the behaviour of the RDF writer, the CSV one has just been updated to match it.
• The behaviour of the CSV writer has also been changed to match that of the RDF writer in handling file write failures (it now continues processing only if --force is given).

5th September 2009 — Sonic Visualiser v1.7 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.7 since the previous release 1.6:

• A new "Insert Item At Selection" function on the Edit menu can be used to create Note and Region layer items whose time extents correspond to the current selection(s)
• Interactively editing points in the Note and Region layers now works much more smoothly
• SV can now import MIDI files that use SMPTE timecode for event timing (importing MIDI files using with the more common timebase-based timing was already supported)
• Time values throughout the display may optionally be shown in seconds and frames at various frame rates
• A crash on exit in Windows has been fixed
• A very unobtrusive user survey is now included
• Various other bug fixes.

22nd June 2009 — Sonic Visualiser v1.6 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.6 since the previous release 1.5:

• The Colour 3D Plot layer now supports logarithmic vertical scale and linear interpolation options.
• A new colour scheme (High Gain) has been added for spectrogram and Colour 3D Plot, which improves readability for some data.
• Further performance improvements have been made to Colour 3D Plot.
• Various other bug fixes.

16th March 2009 — Sonic Visualiser v1.5 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.5 since the previous release 1.4:

• You can now insert time instants, time values, and notes using a MIDI device during playback. If a time value or note layer is current it will be used for insertion (giving a value equal to the pitch class, or the played note, respectively); otherwise an existing or new time instants layer will be used just as it is when inserting instants using the PC keyboard. Using a MIDI device should give better timing than using the PC keyboard.
• There is a new Activity Log window with a (purely informative) list of events and user interactions that happen while SV is running.
• The spectrogram has somewhat improved graphical scaling, and this is now the default (being much faster than the 4x oversampled method). The previous default is still available as a preference.
• Visualisation of very dense colour plots (such as spectrograms calculated by plugins) is substantially faster in this release.
• Spectrogram display is now faster in many circumstances.
• Alignment using the MATCH plugin is faster on OS/X than before.
• SV will take into account RDF plugin descriptions, if available, in order to make somewhat better decisions about display of plugin outputs (for example, placing segmentation data into a layer with segmentation plot type).
• You can now switch layers by clicking on the spare area at the left end of the pane that is also used for the current pane indicator.
• The vertical black lines dividing segments in the time value layer's segmentation plot style are now optional.
• Several widget layout bugs on OS/X have been fixed.
• Several serious crashing, deadlock, and data corruption bugs have been fixed.

5th December 2008 — Sonic Visualiser v1.4 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.4 since the previous release 1.3:

• SV now has a Region layer type, used for display of features with durations. It also supports Vamp v2.0 plugins that provide durations for features.
• Layer data can now be imported from RDF described using the Audio Features Ontology, as well as from the existing text file types. SV can also export annotation layer data to RDF/Turtle, although in a somewhat simplistic manner at present.
• You can search for transforms by text in the new "Find a Transform" dialog. This searches both installed plugins, and plugins that have not been installed but that have descriptions available on the semantic web.
• You can now zoom and scroll vertically in the time-value, note, and colour 3d plot layers.
• Sonic Visualiser can now load sessions from uncompressed XML files as well as its own compressed-XML .sv format. Files with extension .xml that contain suitable session data will be loaded as sessions. Note that .xml extension files still do not show up in the default file load filter. This is intentional, as there may be any kind of data in them - if you want to load uncompressed session files from XML, you need to know you're doing it.
• Several crashes and other bugs have been fixed.

10th July 2008 — Sonic Visualiser v1.3 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.3 since the previous release 1.2:

• There is a new spreadsheet-style data viewer and editor for viewing and editing the data in some types of annotation layer.
• Alignments are now saved to the session file.
• The spectrogram layer is usually somewhat faster than it was.
• You can now hold Shift while dragging to move an item, in order to override the initial drag resistance introduced in 1.2.
• The gross mis-labelling of time lines in the ruler has been fixed.
• There is a new, somewhat provisional PulseAudio output driver.
• Several other bug fixes.

20th February 2008 — Sonic Visualiser v1.2 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.2 since the previous release 1.0:

• SV now supports time-alignment of multiple performances of a work loaded at the same time. This option is enabled when the MATCH Vamp plugin is installed. When alignment is switched on and more than one audio file is open, SV will assume that all open files are differently timed performances of the same work, and will calculate time alignments for them. Playback will then play only a single file at a time, and the playback cursors in other files will track at the varying speeds to try to ensure that each is at the same point in the underlying score. This enables effective comparison of several such files, as well as a meaningful way to switch from one performance to another during playback (ensuring that the switch happens at the correct point in the performance being switched to).
• There is a new Image layer, which can display images from the local filesystem or retrieved via HTTP or FTP.
• A new measurement tool has been added. With the measurement tool selected, dragging in a pane draws a rectangle labelled with the scale values for its start and end corners and its size. You can have any number of measurements present at once; they are associated with the top layer, their scale values depend on the scale for that layer, and they are only shown when that layer is at the top and the measurement tool is active. Measurements are saved and reloaded in the session file. Drawing measurements can be undone and redone, and a measurement can be deleted by hitting Del when highlighted. Note that the measurement tool shows the scale values associated with the pixel positions of the mouse when dragging, not any values associated with actual features present in the audio or its analysis (e.g. the values are not rounded to the nearest spectrogram bin).
• You can double-click using the measurement tool in the spectrogram to get an instant measurement rectangle for a feature. This is a purely graphical feature that works by calculating the boundary of a contiguous region of pixels "similar to" the one you double-clicked on; it does not use audio analysis. Adjusting the gain and colour scheme etc of the spectrogram will (by design) affect the measurements obtained this way.
• The spectrum can now optionally show frequency estimates of peaks aligned with a piano keyboard along the horizontal axis (this needs some refinement).
• The harmonic cursor in the spectrogram has moved from the Select tool to the Measurement tool. There is now a similar harmonic cursor in the spectrum. Both of them show more information as text alongside the cursor than previously.
• There is a new Erase tool for erasing individual points from an editable layer.
• Several keyboard shortcuts have changed: all of the Alt+key shortcuts now either use Ctrl or a plain keypress with no modifier, to avoid clashes with window manager shortcuts and to make them easier to use and remember
• The playback controls are now in a Playback menu as well as the toolbar.
• There is a new key and mouse control reference under Help (or press F2).
• You can double-click on a pane in navigate mode to jump to a time.
• All of the single-colour layers (waveform, time values etc) now allow you to define your own colours as well as using the built-in set. The colour of a layer is now shown next to its name on the pane.
• When you add a new single-colour layer it will use a default colour that is not yet in use in another layer (if there is one).
• Single-colour layers can now optionally have black backgrounds (with a set of lighter colours in the default colour palette that use black backgrounds by default).
• There's a new Printer colour scheme in the spectrogram with only a small number of grey shades.
• Vertical zoom in a log-scaled spectrogram is much more intuitive; it now leaves the point that was in the centre of the visible area in the centre after zoom, instead of the point that was in the centre of the linear range corresponding to the visible area.
• You can now turn a colour 3d plot layer upside down by clicking the Invert Vertical Scale button.
• There's a new Layer Summary window which shows the panes and layer data in a tree layout. This is very simplistic at the moment.
• Each pane now has an [X] button at its top left, which removes that pane when clicked.
• There's a new Solo play mode toggle button; when active, only the currently selected pane is played. This is also the default when time alignment is in use.
• Rewind/ffwd now stay confined to the selection if Play Selection is enabled; also, the rewind and ffwd "one step" buttons are now enabled even if there is no time instants layer for them to align to (they align to the time ruler instead and so jump in steps of a size dependent on the zoom level).
• You can now export note layers to MIDI.
• MIDI note velocity is partially supported. Note velocity is retained when importing and exporting MIDI and is used in playback, but it is not yet shown in the display and cannot yet be edited.
• You can now drag-and-drop files (of whatever type) onto SV from other programs such as file managers or web browsers.
• mp3 files (and Ogg, but they aren't supported on Windows at the moment) are now decoded in a background thread so you can see the start of the track without waiting for the rest to decode.
• Mac builds of SV can now load AAC/mp4 files and anything else supported by QuickTime.
• There is now an option to resample audio files on import if they don't match the samplerate of the first file loaded. By default this is switched off, as it affects the visible waveform. The default behaviour is unchanged (play at the wrong rate). There is still no option to handle multiple rates "correctly" (i.e. by resampling on playback and showing the waveforms at different resolutions according to each one's underlying rate) and there probably never will be.
• SV can now open .m3u playlist files, though it's a hazardous thing to do as it simply loads all the files in the playlist at once.
• SV now has various options for how to number tapped time instants (bar/beat, plain counter, time in seconds, tempo etc).
• The official builds use Qt 4.3, which fixes some nasty bugs in the file dialog that the version 1.0 builds suffered from.

7th July 2007 — Sonic Annotator v0.3 released

Changes in Sonic Annotator 0.3 since the previous release 0.2:

Front-end changes:

• A new --force front-end option (distinct from the --csv-force and --rdf-force back-end options) has been added, which makes Sonic Annotator continue to process subsequent audio files instead of exiting after an error, if multiple audio files have been specified.

RDF back-end (feature writer) changes:

• The RDF writer now conforms more correctly with the Music Ontology in the way it relates signal, track, and track metadata. Signals that have available metadata now gain a Track resource to associate that metadata with, instead of hanging it directly from the Signal resource; also the audio file now encodes the signal rather than the signal being available as the audio file (matching the domain specification of the Music Ontology). Note that this new resource structure will not be properly read by versions of Sonic Visualiser prior to 1.6 (should importing the data into Sonic Visualiser be of interest to you).
• The --rdf-signal-uri option has been removed and replaced with the more meaningful set of options --rdf-audiofile-uri, --rdf-track-uri, and --rdf-maker-uri.
• A new --rdf-network option is available, to cause Sonic Annotator to try to retrieve RDF descriptions for plugins from the network where those descriptions are not available locally. Use of this option is recommended, but it is not the default because of the possible performance implication (even though the results are mostly cached, there may be some network access involved).
• The RDF writer now writes the computed_by property for signal features.
• Plugin and output URIs in the resulting RDF are now percent-encoded.

10th May 2007 — Sonic Visualiser v1.0 released

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.0:

• First official release of Sonic Visualiser