- Home page and downloads: https://sonicvisualiser.org/
- Code project: https://github.com/sonic-visualiser/sonic-visualiser
Sonic Visualiser is a free, open source, cross-platform desktop application for music audio visualisation, annotation, and analysis.
With Sonic Visualiser you can:
- Load audio files in various formats (WAV/AIFF, Ogg, Opus, MP3 etc) and view their waveforms
- Look at audio visualisations such as spectrogram views, with interactive adjustment of display parameters
- Annotate audio data by adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves
- Run feature-extraction plugins to calculate annotations automatically, using algorithms such as beat trackers, pitch detectors and so on (see https://vamp-plugins.org/)
- Import annotation data from various text formats and MIDI files
- Play back the original audio with synthesised annotations, taking care to synchronise playback with the display position
- Slow down and speed up playback and loop segments of interest, including seamless looping of complex non-contiguous areas
- Export annotations and audio selections to external files.
Sonic Visualiser can also be controlled remotely using the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol (if support is compiled in).
If you are using Sonic Visualiser in research work for publication, please see the file CITATION for a reference to cite.
Sonic Visualiser was devised and developed in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, primarily by Chris Cannam, with contributions from Christian Landone, Mathieu Barthet, Dan Stowell, Jesús Corral García, Matthias Mauch, and Craig Sapp. Special thanks to Professor Mark Sandler for initiating and supporting the project.
Sonic Visualiser is currently lightly maintained by Chris Cannam at Particular Programs Ltd. There are no major features in development as of this release, only bug fixes. If you need something specific and have funding available for it, please contact us.
The Sonic Visualiser code is in general
- Copyright (c) 2005-2007 Chris Cannam
- Copyright (c) 2006-2020 Queen Mary University of London
- Copyright (c) 2020-2023 Particular Programs Ltd
with a few exceptions as indicated in the individual source files.
Russian translation provided by Alexandre Prokoudine, copyright 2006-2019 Alexandre Prokoudine.
Czech translation provided by Pavel Fric, copyright 2010-2019 Pavel Fric.
This work was partially funded by the European Commission through the SIMAC project IST-FP6-507142 and the EASAIER project IST-FP6-033902.
This work was partially funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through its Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM).
This work was partially funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the OMRAS2 project EP/E017614/1, the Musicology for the Masses project EP/I001832/1, and the Sound Software project EP/H043101/1.
Sonic Visualiser is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING included with this distribution for more information.
Sonic Visualiser may also make use of the following libraries:
- Qt5 - Copyright The Qt Company, distributed under the LGPL
- JACK - Copyright Paul Davis, Jack O'Quin et al, under the LGPL
- PortAudio - Copyright Ross Bencina, Phil Burk et al, BSD license
- Ogg decoder - Copyright CSIRO Australia, BSD license
- MAD mp3 decoder - Copyright Underbit Technologies Inc, GPL
- Opus decoder - Copyright Xiph.org and others, BSD license
- libsamplerate - Copyright Erik de Castro Lopo, BSD license
- libsndfile - Copyright Erik de Castro Lopo, LGPL
- FFTW3 - Copyright Matteo Frigo and MIT, GPL
- Rubber Band Library - Copyright Particular Programs Ltd, GPL
- Vamp plugin SDK - Copyright Chris Cannam and QMUL, BSD license
- LADSPA plugin SDK - Copyright Richard Furse et al, LGPL
- RtMIDI - Copyright Gary P. Scavone, BSD license
- Dataquay - Copyright Particular Programs Ltd, BSD license
- Sord and Serd - Copyright David Robillard, BSD license
- Redland - Copyright Dave Beckett and the University of Bristol, LGPL/Apache license
- liblo OSC library - Copyright Steve Harris, GPL
- Cap'n Proto - Copyright Sandstorm Development Group, Inc, BSD license
(Some distributions of Sonic Visualiser may have one or more of these libraries statically linked.) Many thanks to their authors.
If you are planning to compile Sonic Visualiser from source code, please read the relevant instructions:
- Linux and similar systems: COMPILE_linux.md
- macOS: COMPILE_macos.md
- Windows: COMPILE_windows.md
These three platform builds are checked via continuous integration:
- Linux CI build:
- macOS CI build:
- Windows CI build:
For notes on how to update and edit the UI translation strings, see TRANSLATION.md
For more information about Sonic Visualiser, please go to