I can see your worrrrrds....

February 25, 2006 11:27 AM

Looking for a way to turn the visual waveform of an audio file in to an animated GIF.

Any suggestions? In a way this is a two part question since, I imagine the first step would be to find...

1) a good audio recorder (preferably free) that displays the waveform visually...

and

2) what to do with it to GIF it up. that's where i'm really at a loss.

MPEG, AVI or MOV might be acceptable too if that's the only route.

posted by poweredbybeard to Technology (7 answers total)

For starters, Audacity is a good program that will allow you to import a sound and see its waveform. Then I'm guessing the next step would be to do a screen capture. IIRC, Audacity scrolls the waveform as you play it - so if you set one of these programs to record the appropriate area of the screen, you'll get something acceptable. Then you could use QuickTime to export the movie as an animated GIF, although I'm not sure if thats a feature exclusive to Pro users.
posted by xvs22 at 11:35 AM on February 25, 2006

Winamp's AVS has a plugin (on some dudes website) that lets you export to AVI. The avs (included in a full install) is the most powerful free way of creating visualizations for music so it would be very rudimentary to create a basic waveform one. They give you access to all the maths and lots of great examples. As for a program that will turn AVI into a GIF: You're going to want to do serious editing on the animation if you're planning on using the .gif's in a website - the number of frames is going to make the filesize HUGE, even with indexing and optimizing. You don't usually want a .gif made for the net to get over 50 frames, though it depends on the filesize. I would take the framerate down to 6 or 8 fps. GIMP lets you open AVI's like GIF's but this feature doesnt work in windows, I think its a linux only thing and it might just be MPEGS now that I think about it. I use GIMP a lot for creating animated GIF's - it lets you use frames like layers in photoshop and its a wizz to go between optimized (where layers can be smaller if thats all there were changes between frames) and unoptomized, and lots of options for indexing. I would use premiere or after effects, there are a host of others that will turn an AVI into a GIF, but you also want one that will be easy to limit the frame rate, drop frames, and optimize (index to two colors and the whole optimize thing as well). Good luck
posted by psychobum at 7:43 PM on February 25, 2006

here's whacko's avs grabber (on the bottom) put the ape plugin in the avs dir and the dll in plugins. heres the line in plugin. open up the line in channel by choosing add url and add linein:// I was unable to get the line-in to record to an audio file :-( but I was able to get the avi of what was playing into the mic using winamp. You have to open the avs editor and try my little preset which is just a simple visualization with the avs grabber added. Choose the avs grabber line and you can set the output, codec (can cause things to crash), and to start grabbing. You could record the audio from audacity, then grab the avs to an avi and splice them up in virtualdub if your feeling saucy. Probably not the hack you were looking for, and it seems thered be something easier out there. You could just record the audio and post it in after effects, there's a plugin for it. I was just inspired to test this because the avs/avs grabber is such a cool visual/math/music tool. What you can do is if you set the output avs grabber audio plugin it will record the audio with the avsgrabber , so if you prerecord the audio with something like audacity then play it in winamp with all these plugins and hacks youll get an avi synced to the audio, just not live.
posted by psychobum at 10:52 PM on February 25, 2006

This is an expensive solution (if you only want to do this), but Adobe After Effects can do it. You import the audio and use the Audio Waveform effect -- and then export as an animated GIF (or a SWF if you want).
posted by grumblebee at 11:06 PM on February 25, 2006

It depends on how you want to it to move.
Do you want a long scrolling shot of the waveform moving past, or do you want a static shot with a bouncing waveform? Does that make sense?
I would get screen grabs as mentioned above, but then I would import them into Flash to animate them. It's so easy to animate stuff like that in Flash and then you can export it to an animated gif or whatever format you want.

It's also going to be a lot more labour intensive if it's a long audio file.
posted by chococat at 10:37 AM on February 26, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far everyone... definitely some things to look in to. To clarify, it would be a static shot, and the sound file(s) would oly be around 2-3 secs.
posted by poweredbybeard at 10:59 AM on February 26, 2006

hey, i'll give it a shot if you can post the audio file
posted by chococat at 7:45 PM on February 26, 2006