Opening and Viewing Audio Files

Supported Audio Formats

At this time, Song Scope only supports 16-bit PCM .wav files and Audio IFF (.aif/.aiff) files as well as Wildlife Acoustics Audio Compression format (.wac) files at a variety of sampling rates. You will need to have recordings in this format to use Song Scope.

Opening Audio Files

From the "File" menu, select "Open...". This will pop up a file "chooser" window from which you can select one or more .wav, .aif or .wac files to open. Each selected file will then be opened in its own Song Scope window.

Linux users can also invoke Song Scope from the command line with a list of files as arguments. A window will be opened for each file specified.

In addition to opening the .wav, .aif or .wac file, Song Scope will look for a Song Scope annotation (.ssn) file in a SongScopeNotes subdirectory and, if present, will load the annotations.

In addition to .wav files, Song Scope can also open .ssn annotation files directly.

Navigating Between Windows

If you have many windows open, you can use the "Go" menu to quickly navigate to a specific window and bring it to the top. MacOS users can use the standard "Window" menu instead.

Viewing Audio Files

Each audio file window consists of 3 major parts, from top to bottom:

The Waveform Plot displays a "time domain" representation of the audio signal.
The Spectrogram Plot displays a "frequency domain" representation of the audio signal.
The control panel contains several folder tabs, each with a collection of controls including Display Controls, Mixer Controls, Spectrogram Controls, Detector Controls, and Recognizer Controls.

View Controls

The following controls can be found just below the waveform and/or spectrogram plots and above the control panel, from left to right, as follows:

Toggle Control Panel: Toggle between showing and hiding the control panel.
Split View: Show both the waveform and spectrogram plots.
Spectrogram View: Show just the spectrogram plot and hide the waveform plot
Waveform View: Show just the waveform plot and hide the spectrogram plot
Play Audio: Begin audio playback through the computer's sound hardware starting at the current display position and continuing until the end of the recording, or stopped (see below). You can also simply press the space bar to begin playback.
Stop Audio: Stop audio playback (see above). You can also simply press the space bar to stop playback.
Zoom Out: Zoom out on the time (horizontal) axis. Each time this button is pressed, the displayed portion is reduced by a factor of two.
Zoom Slider: The zoom slider adjusts the time (horizontal) axis magnification. Moving the slider to the left zooms out and moving the slider to the right zooms in.
Zoom In: Zoom in on the time (horizontal) axis. Each time this button is pressed, the display portion is magnified by a factor of two.
Go Back: Go to the previous annotation.
Scroll Bar: A horizontal scroll bar can be found between the plots and the control panel that lets you scroll through time to view different parts of the audio file.
Go Forward: Go to the next annotation.

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