Sonic Visualizer, a free application designed to make exploring audio data as fun as possible, has been updated.

Sonic Visualiser will be of particular interest to musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers and anyone else looking for a friendly way to take a look at what lies inside the audio file.

Sonic Visualiser has powerful annotation capabilities to help you to describe what you find, and the ability to run automated annotation and analysis plugins in the Vamp analysis plugin format – as well as applying standard audio effects.

Sonic Visualiser is Free Software, distributed under the GNU General Public License and available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows. It was developed at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, by Chris Cannam (of Rosegarden, Studio to Go!, DSSI etc).

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.3 since the previous version 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.