Signet makes sample library development (multi-sampling) easier and more effective by offering a suite of tools covering these areas:
- Bulk editing audio files
- Bulk renaming audio files
- Bulk organising files (moving them into folders)
- And in one case, generate new files based on other files
Signet is not exclusively useful for sample library development though. The editing features in particular could be useful to anyone working with large sets of audio files.
This tool is currently in-development. There are no guarantees that the commands will stay the same, or that the tools will continue to function in the same way.
I'm an audio plugin and sample library developer. I created this tool to improve and speed-up my workflow. I'm happy to take bug reports and provide Signet-support. However, if you would like substantial custom features let me know, I may be available to hire.
Currently only supports reading and writing WAV and FLAC files.
There are experimental binaries available for Signet in the Releases section of the Github page. The Mac version is not yet codesigned or notarized, so for now you will need to right click the application and select "open" and go through the prompts the first time.
Alternatively, you can build Signet from the source code. This process is designed to be simple for those familiar with building C++ programs. There are no library dependencies external to this repo. Just run CMake to generate a configuration for your preferred build tool (Visual Studio Solution, makefile, etc.), and then build using that.
A C++17 compiler is required. The compiler must also be compatible with the magic_enum library which is used by Signet. Signet has been tested with MSVC 16.5.1, Apple Clang 11.0.0, GCC 9.3.0 and Clang 10 on Linux.
The general pattern is signet <input-file(s)> <command>. You can have one or more commands, in which case each command will process the set of input-files in the order that you specify them.
Add a fade-in of 1 second to filename.wav:
signet filename.wav fade in 1s
Auto-tunes all the audio files in the directory 'untuned-files' to their nearest musical pitch:
signet untuned-files auto-tune
Normalise (to a common gain) all WAV files in the current directory to -3dB:
signet *.wav norm -3
Normalise (to a common gain) filename1.wav and filename2.flac to -1dB:
signet filename1.wav filename2.flac norm -1
Offset the start of each file to the nearest zero-crossing within the first 100 milliseconds. Perform this for all WAV files in any subfolder (recursively) of sampler that starts with "session", excluding files in "session 2" that end with "-unprocessed.wav":
signet "sampler/session*/**.wav" "-sampler/session 2/*-unprocessed.wav" zcross-offset 100ms
Rename any file in any of the folders of "one-shots" that match the regex "(.*)-a". They shall be renamed to the whatever group 1 of the regex match was, with a -b suffix:
signet "one-shots/**/.*" rename (.*)-a <1>-b
Convert all audio files in the folder "my_folder" (not recursively) to a sample rate of 44100Hz and a bit-depth of 24:
signet my_folder convert sample-rate 44100 bit-depth 24
Signet is flexible in terms of what files to process. You can specify one or more of any of the following input options:
- A single file such as
file.wav. - A directory such as
sounds/unprocessed. In this case Signet will search for all audio files in that directory and process them all. You can specify the option--recursiveto make this also search subfolders. - A glob-style filename pattern. You can use
*to match any non-slash character and use**to match any character. So essentially use**to signify recursively searching folders. For example*.wavwill match any file that has a.wavextension in the current folder.unprocessed/**/*.wavwill match any file with the.wavextension in theunprocessedfolder and any subfolder of it. Some shells, such as bash, already do this pathname expansion prior to calling any command. Signet's implementation of this feature is a little more specific to audio files but largely the same. To use Signet's version instead of your shell's version, put quotes around the argument.
You can exclude certain files from being processed by prefixing them with a dash. For example "file.*" "-*.wav" will match all files in the current directory that start with file, except those with the .wav extension.
Input files are processed and then saved back to file (overwritten). Signet features a simple undo command that will restore any files that you overwrote in the last call.
Care has been taken to ensure the help text is comprehensive and understandable. Run signet with the option --help to see information about the available options. Run with --help-all to see all the available commands. You can also add --help after a command to see the options of that command specifically. For example:
signet --help
signet --help-all
signet auto-tune --help
signet fade --help-all
signet convert file-format --help
Signet overwrites the files that it processes. Therefore to avoid errors, it's advisable to make a copy your audio files before processing them with Signet.
However, Signet can help with safety too. It features a simple undo system. You can undo any changes made in the previous run of Signet by running it again with the undo command. For example signet undo.
Files that were overwritten are restored, new files that were created are destroyed, and files that were renamed are un-renamed. You can only undo once - you cannot keep going back in history.
There are lots of ways to process audio files using Signet. See the documentation for the full list. Here some of them:
- Detect the pitch of the files and print it out
- Auto-tune files to their nearest musical pitch
- Fix audio that drifts out of tune
- Convert sample-rate, bit-depth and file-format
- Embed sampler metadata to the wav/flac file - the root note can be auto detected
- Rename files - including auto-mapping MIDI regions
- Change pitch
- Filter
- Normalise
- Remove silence from start/end
- Make into seamless loops
- Fade in/out
The metadata in the file is preserved even after stretching, chopping, resampling, or converting from WAV to FLAC. This includes loop points, MIDI mapping data, etc. However, in the case that Signet chops away part of the audio that contained a marker or loop, a warning will be issued as there is no reasonable way to resolve this.
With WAV files, metadata is read and written in the most commonly used RIFF chunks - so should transfer to other tools. FLAC does not have the same benefit - for the types of metadata we want to use, there is no standardisation. To work around this, Signet stores data in the FLAC 'application' block using the id 'SGNT'. This is a block designed for application-specific data. A JSON string is stored there containing all of the metadata that Signet cares about. Developers of other software are welcome to read this data. It is the same format as the metadata printed when using the print-info command.