WaveSurfer is an audio editor widely used for studies of
acoustic phonetics
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates time domain features such as the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, o ...
. It is a simple but fairly powerful program for interactive display of sound pressure waveforms, spectral sections, spectrograms, pitch tracks and transcriptions. It can read and write a number of transcription file formats used in industrial speech research including
TIMIT TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time.
TIMIT was designed to further acoustic-phonetic knowledge and au ...
.
WaveSurfer is
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
, distributed under a
permissive free software licence
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...
.
Features
Wavesurfer provides basic audio editing operations, such as excision, copying, pasting, zero-crossing adjustment, and effects such as fading, normalization, echo, inversion, reversal, replacement with silence, and DC-removal, but, in view of its scientific orientation, does not offer effects of interest to musicians such as
flange
A flange is a protruded ridge, lip or rim, either external or internal, that serves to increase strength (as the flange of an iron beam such as an I-beam or a T-beam); for easy attachment/transfer of contact force with another object (as the f ...
.
Development
Wavesurfer is written in
Tcl/Tk
Tk is a free and open-source, cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements of GUI widgets for building a graphical user interface (GUI) in many programming languages.
Tk provides a number of widgets commonly needed to ...
using the
Snack audio library
The Snack Sound Toolkit is a cross-platform library written by Kåre Sjölander of the Swedish Royal Technical University (KTH) with bindings for the scripting languages Tcl, Python, and Ruby. It provides audio I/O, audio analysis and processing f ...
. It therefore runs on most platforms, including
Microsoft Windows,
Mac OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
,
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...
,
Solaris,
HP-UX,
FreeBSD, and
IRIX. It is scriptable and supports plugins.
See also
*
List of music software
This is a list of software for creating, performing, learning, analyzing, researching, broadcasting and editing music. This article only includes software, not services. For streaming services such as iHeartRadio, Pandora, Prime Music, and Spotify, ...
References
External links
Wavesurfer home pageWavesurfer at sourceforge
Free audio editors
Linguistic research software
Free software programmed in Tcl
Audio editing software for Linux
Software that uses Tk (software)
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