Plotting AIFF waveform

[Chris]

Hello folks -

I seem to remember a while back that some clever person had produced a routine for parsing and plotting sound waveforms. Or am I dreaming it?

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanx

Chris

[Mark]

Hi Chris,

It is in RevOnline.

Best,

Mark

[Mark Smith]

It was me....

It's on RevOnline under user "Mark Smith"

or from my own site:


http://www.futility.co.uk/futsoft/revolutionstuff.html

Best,

Mark

[FourthWorld]

Way cool, Mark.

What would be needed to also generate wave forms from MP3 files?

[Chris]

Fantastic, thanks!

Chris

[Mark Smith]

Way cool, Mark.

What would be needed to also generate wave forms from MP3 files?

The difficulty with mp3s (or mp4s, or ogg etc) is that they're compressed, - so in order to draw a waveform, it would be necessary to uncompress them, which is what an mp3 player does.

There's really no reason that an mp3 could not be un-compressed to a wav or aif and then rendered, but it all takes time (which may or may not matter in a given application), and would either have to be done by an external (Trevor DeVores qt external?), or involve apple/vb scripting to get iTunes/WinAmp or whatever to do it.

If you have Lame or somesuch installed, it can be done with a call to the shell.

As it is, my waveform control is pretty slow, except on very short audio files, even with the compromises I made, so the range of applications for it is pretty limited (Scott Rossi used it in his tmAudio plug-in, but that mainly deals in short soundFX type files), and though I've tried various optimisations, I don't think I can do much more for the moment, unless I learn C and write an external!

Actually, this wouldn't be a huge job for someone who knows how to write C externals, as it's simply a question of mapping sample values to points in a graphic.

Best,

Mark

[Mark Smith]

Actually, once again I must eat my words...having thought about it as a result of this thread, I've found a way to speed it up by a factor of 2 or 3.

I'm on the road at the moment, but I should be able to put an updated version up in the next couple of weeks.

Best,

Mark

[FourthWorld]

Mark, you rock.

Looking forward to the spiffy new build....

[jammmet]

Hi Mark,
I realise it's been a while, but do you still have a working link to download the waveform plotter? Many thanks