[LAU] File managers for musicians, waveform thumbnails, presentation as tightly packed spiral a'la vinyl ? (Caja, MATE)

[djbarney]

Hi,

Thought I'd air this one to see if there's anyone already using this 
kind of thing out there.

I'd become frustrated by lack of support for musicians in Linux window 
manager file managers. No default waveform/spectrogram support. No MIDI 
notation previews. No BPM or key info, etc, etc.

I set up Caja to thumbnail WAV files using Sox ... see some screenshots 
on this forum thread ...

http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12514&p=55280#p55280

I'm looking at some other thumbnailers as listed on the thread.

I'm thinking of doing some development of the MATE Caja file browser to 
allow better presentation of audio file waveform thumbnails as currently 
they can only be square. Maybe LAU members already know of someone who 
has done this ? No point in reinventing the wheel ... otherwise I'll 
take this to LAD.

... and now to the BIG IDEA !

For long samples and tracks having a thumbnail becomes more problematic 
... it may just end up as a thin line, or something that fits the small 
thumbnail but is summing the entire track which is probably not very 
informative. One thing I realised is that I've been using visual 
recognition of tracks for years. I can pick tracks off my vinyl records 
based on the look of the grooves ... basically a vinyl representation of 
the audio waveform. One way of taking this into digital land would be to 
create a full length waveform, and then process it into a tightly packed 
spiral and thumbnail it. That might provide better recognition. So 
that's something I'm working on using Graphics Magick or some other way 
of processing it.

DJ Barney

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http://djbarney.org