I'm Tyler, one of the Co-Founders of SoundViz. Thanks for taking the time to check out SoundViz. We're very excited to get your feedback, so please don't hold back!
I'm curious to see whether there is a market for this, but I already spend so much of my time looking at waveforms I'm not sure I want to look at more. Have you considered spectrograms or spectral phase diagrams, both of which can be considerably more visually interesting than a straight waveform?
If I went through with the purchase I think I'd couple it with a "press a button and playback the original sound" setup, as that would be pretty easy to add to the rfid triggered music playback system I've got one of my R-Pi's rigged up for.
I just played around with a test file and was really impressed by the slider controls to allow modifications. Very neat stuff.
The only suggestion I could think of was perhaps an option for me to add my own colormap?
Let me know how it goes tonight!
"Hello Hacker News friend! Thanks for stopping by. Once you're done checking out SoundViz, we'd love to get your feedback."
... leads to https://www.soundviz.com/ I was kind of expecting that it would bring me to this comment thread.
Small issue: I grabbed an .m4a, uploaded it, and the screen just sat there. Console errors and whatnot. Didn't take a rocket scientist to guess that .mp3 might work better (it did). So I'm all good, but just reporting it.
Again, really good stuff, congrats.
Feedback:
- Overall really nice interface
- At first the messages you get while waiting for the wave are really nice, but then they get slightly annoying. Some kind of indicator of how long it takes would be better. Processing time was acceptable.
- Frankly I think the visualisation is uninteresting. I am not interested in having this hanging on the wall. I tried a wide variety of settings, but it remained uninteresting due to the basic form of the sound wave.
- Tried the record option afterwards. The wave was a little more interesting, and I preferred that experience much more. I would like to be able to play back the sound I recorded and listen to it while I can see the progress on the sound wave.
Agreed on messaging/processing indicator.
The size of the bars is based on the amplitude of the sound you're processing, so your results will vary, depending on the dynamics of the sound. Have you tried In Rainbows? ;)
Recording - You are correct. I think a count down would also be useful. Currently, the recording starts as soon as you hit the button, which can produce some silence at the beginning of the recording if you're not on it. I like the playback idea a lot, though.
Thanks again!
A little more feedback:
- It bothers me that I can't make the bars completely square (the most square setting has a slight roundness to it).
- Maybe an option for designing a custom palette would be interesting. Maybe importing one from http://www.colourlovers.com/ or a similar service could be an option.
- A free download as desktop background option would be a nice touch. Free advertising.
Anyway, very slick interface, looking good!
If not, if you sign up, I can create a draft for you so you can play around.
