Library Edition¶

Sonic Visualiser is a program for viewing and exploring audio data for semantic music analysis and annotation. The Library edition (release 1.9) provides adaptations for the use of Sonic Visualiser at the British Library and new features tailored for musicologists:

- All of the features of the full Sonic Visualiser are provided, except that audio files cannot be saved from it (Kiosk Edition).

- Two operating modes are available:

• minimal mode with an easy to use interface offering playback functionality exclusively (closed listening practice);
• full mode where visualisations (e.g. spectrograms) and audio feature extractions are possible (multimodal listening practice).

- Session templates can be used to load/store the layout of the user interface (waveform, spectrogram, note onsets, etc.) and user parameters.

- Pitch identification can be performed more easily by listening to the notes of the piano keyboard scale in the spectrum and melodic spectrogram representations.

Vamp plugins which are audio processing plugins that extract descriptive information from audio data can be used jointly with Sonic Visualiser.

How to Install Vamp plugins¶

Vamp plugins can be downloaded here .

A Vamp plugin set consists of a single dynamic library file with DLL, .dylib, or .so extension (depending on your platform) plus optionally a category file with .cat extension and an RDF description file with .ttl or .n3 extension.

To install a plugin set, just copy the plugin's library file and any supplied category or RDF files into your system or personal Vamp plugin location.

The plugin file extension and the location to copy into depend on your platform:

File extension     System plugin folder                          Personal plugin folder
Linux or other Unix     .so                         /usr/local/lib/vamp                           $HOME/vamp
OS/X                           .dylib                 /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Vamp           $HOME/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Vamp
Windows (32-bit)       .dll                         C:\Program Files\Vamp Plugins     
Windows (64-bit)       .dll                         C:\Program Files (x86)\Vamp Plugins

You can alternatively set the VAMP_PATH environment variable to list the locations a host should look in for Vamp plugins.

VAMP_PATH should contain a semicolon-separated (on Windows) or colon-separated (OS/X, Linux) list of paths. If it is set, it will completely override the standard locations listed above.

Documentation and Tutorials¶

Documentation and tutorials can be found on the main site of Sonic Visualiser, and on that of the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music at King's College London.