has anyone found a way to display a waveform with sfplay yet?

What I do is creating in advance a short buffer (1500ms) for each soundfile. To do that, I read the file (much) faster and record the result in a buffer. It looks quite nice.

Then I use sfplay~'s position output to control buffer~'s cursor position.

Here is the patch, which is used in a much bigger patch. It needs 2 arguments (I use 1500 and 1500, in ms, but you may need to tweak that, depending on your hard drive). The message create audiofilepath buffername will fill the buffer with a waveform of the audio file.

Comments are welcome, as I'm not sure it's really reliable!

Here is an *old* patch I posted ... in 2006 (!) in this thread :
https://cycling74.com/forums/displaying-a-waveform-in-a-lcd-bennies/

very similar to Patrick's patch : it creates a buffer~ 50 times smaller than the original sound file.

enjoy

M

hi patrick and mathieu,

thank you very much for the help and the example patches!

patrick, in case you have time to answer a few questions that come up for me when i try your patch:
-where do the two arguments (1500 and 1500) go? i tried putting them in the loadmess objects.
-and the "create audiofilepath buffername" message, where should i send that? i tried sending a message like that into the inlet on the top.
-the [/] and [if] objects are giving me "inlet: wrong message or type" errors

so at the moment, i can't get it to work, but i must admit there are several objects in the patch that i don't fully understand. maybe i'll do better tomorrow morning after some coffee..

mathieu,

your patch is actually pretty much what i've been using the past few years, you're probably where i got the idea from in the first place! thank you for that.

do you happen to know why, most of the time, only the beginning of the waveform is shown?

i don't get any error messages, and your patch is very clear, but unfortunately, most of the time, the waveform won't fully load, and only the first few seconds are shown.
see the attached screenshots.

i'm using 24/96 wav files, mono at the moment, of a few minutes long, on a macbook pro with max 6.

thanks again!

your sfplay~ stops playing probably because your HD is too slow (playing 24/96 wav at 50x speed requires very fast access)
you can try increasing sfplay~ disk buffer size (2nd arg) (Patrick's patch uses 26208000 )
or slow down the playback speed.
...or buy a SSD ;-)

mathieU

you were right! i've increased the sfplay~ disk buffer size to 40.320.000 (it needs multiples of 20160) and for the moment, the patch is displaying any soundfile i'm throwing at it, including half-hour long 24/96 stereo files..

my next machine will be ssd based, but for now this is great, and if it stops working i'll know what to tweak.

thanks again for the very helpful and clear example!

Save the patch I sent before as "waveformAF".
Save the following code as "bufferRuler.js"

// bufferRuler
// Patrick Delges
// Centre Henri Pousseur
// 20130415

mgraphics.init();
mgraphics.relative_coords = 0;
mgraphics.autofill = 0;

var dis_width = mgraphics.size[0];    // size of the jsui
var dis_height = mgraphics.size[1];    //

var bgcolor = [.75, .54, 1.];    // default background color

var theDuration = 0;            // size of the buffer (ms)
var intervalWidth = dis_width;    // interval (in pixel) between increments
var minuteIncrement = 1;        // duration (in minutes) between increments

/*
bufferRulerInstantiate = 0;

function loadbang()
{
    if (!bufferRulerInstantiate)
        post ("bufferRuler by pdelges@crfmw.be - Centre Henri Pousseur 2013\n");
    bufferRulerInstantiate = 1;

}
*/

function bang()
{
    mgraphics.redraw();
}

function paint()
{
    dis_width = mgraphics.size[0];
    dis_height = mgraphics.size[1];

    // see https://cycling74.com/forums/onresize-when-a-jsui-in-resized-in-presentation-mode
    // the size will be updated both in Patching & Presentation mode
    // and in all views.

    computeIntervals ();

    with (mgraphics)
    {
        set_source_rgb(bgcolor);
        rectangle (0, 0, dis_width, dis_height);
        fill();

        select_font_face("Arial");
        set_font_size(10);
        set_line_width (1);

        for (x_pos = 0, minute = 0; x_pos = 60000)
    {
        minuteWidth = dis_width / (theDuration / 60000);
        intervalWidth = minuteWidth;

        //post ("->" + minuteIncrement + ", " + minuteWidth + "\n");
        while (intervalWidth < 25)
        {
            minuteIncrement++;
            intervalWidth += minuteWidth;
        }
        mgraphics.redraw();
    }
    else
        intervalWidth = dis_width;
}

function labelbgcolor(R, G, B)
{
    bgcolor = [R, G, B];
    mgraphics.redraw();
}

Then savevand open this patch:

The Javascript UI draws a ruler you can put over the waveform~ ruler.

The difference with Mathieu is that in his solution, the files are always read 50x faster, so if it does work for one file, it will probably work for others.
In my solution, the speed depends on the length of the file, ther idea is to have buffers of constant length (1500 in the example). If it doesn't work, then the buffer size should be increased.

If the file is too short, then it's simply imported.

hi patrick,

thank you very much for the additional info!

i will dive deeper into your patch the coming days and report back - very interesting to have several different approaches to look into.

i would just use a parallel buffer~ with waveform~ as display ...