Hi all. I recently got the trial version of Spectralayers, and while it is great, I would like te export the spectrogram to an image to print it. How would I do that, or is that even possible? (and if it can’t, does anyone know an application that can?)
I haven’t even thought if you can take a still of the spectral but if your on windows you could always save a screen shot and crop and print
Thx for the reply! is there also a way to consolidate the stereo channels into one image, so I get the both in one?
I’ve done the screenshot method as well, unfortunately there is no official spectrogram format for images. In Izotope you can technically save as an image file (I forgot the name of the format Izotope allows you to save as) and print but quality is lost. It would be great if there was some sort of spectral audio image standard that maintains quality (192hz) and allows for conversion amongst other editors. Since Steinberg created new standards (such as VST and ARA) it wouldnt be a bad idea for them to create a spectral image format that is universal across all digital editors.
Also to be honest with you, an mp3 file is not an ideal compression format and it’s really stupid how that has been the standard for audio for almost 20 years. A universal image format has the potential to not only compress audio but also maintain the quality. To me it never made any sense why wav format became the standard for audio quality when it’s been made pretty clear that a spectral image is the highest quality.
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If I understand correctly, you basically want the image of Mono audio, so both channels mixed together to one channel. You can do that in SpectraLayers via “Project” > “Reformat…” , just select “Mono” as target Configuration and hit “Change Format”, if you want you can adjust the amount of every channel for the final mix in the next step or just accept the default values, and after that you’re good with a Mono version.
Unfortunately SpectraLayers cannot export a picture of the displayed spectrogram, as far as I know, so you would have to resort to the screenshot method mentioned - obviously the resolution is limited to the resolution of your display/monitor, so it might not be the best resolution for a high quality print (if we consider a typical resolution of 300 pixel per inch [ppi] for the print).
iZotope RX can directly save a screenshot as a PNG file, although the help says, that its size is also limited by the resolution of your monitor (and even on my 4K monitor the maximum resolution for this function seems limited to 3000 pixel per dimension).
The only application I know of, that lets you render a spectrogram as a picture with greater dimensions from an audio file is “Photosounder”, although when I tried it, I wasn’t very succesful (crashes with very high resolution, somewhat unintuitive handling, weird user interface).
But here is a suggestion I just thought about: In SpectraLayers (or any other application that can show a spectrogram with an adjustable visible section of it) you could just zoom in on either or both axes (time/frequency), adjust the FFT-size to get some more details, take several screenshots while you move/scroll a bit through the spectrogram (on time and/or frequency axis) between the screenshots and stitch the pictures together to one huge image - basically create a panorama from multiple pictures like in photography. It surely is some manual work and might require some knowlegde with editing of pictures, but I can imagine the result will be very cool … I’ll have to try it myself at some point…
Fortunately for this already exists https://photosounder.com/
Actually since as early as Spectralayers, if not earlier.
His dedicated developer has made sure you may work with images in and out of sound (save them in .bmp 8 bits. jpg 8 bits, TIFF 32 bits, .png 8 bits). Plus he has had a long term view about this program, has kept it and expanded, including to soon bring the idea of creating 3 tracks to secure complete RGB files work as sound.
See Mr Michel Rouzic explaining this himself
Photosounder is a very unique and accessible program for its price $100. Totally recommended
I didnt remember photosounder when this topic came up but I do remember me messing with this program around decade ago. I just repurchased this… I sure do hope the developer commits to updating because photosounder has a lot of potential however it unfortunately has shortcomings. That RGB idea of stereo imaging is what I originally thought how spectral editing would advance to (around 15 years). That was how initially logically perceived how spectral editing would be done, there’s nothing wrong with the way spectralayers gui does it (with the 2 window left up and right bottom window) however its more logical to combine the the stereo file into one (that way you can visually edit the stereo image in a logical way). The way photosounder will do stereo imaging is so much logical.
Also I do hope that image files can becomes a standard within the audio world. I have been recently working with one client over the past couple of months (doing various work) and working with wav files has become a nightmare stumbling block and it feels like traveling back in in time. If I separate a recording (3 minute song or a 3 minute master recording) into 20 layers and I want to send my work to somebody, the person on the other end usually has a hard time receiving it. It is very difficult trying to send a project file that is 2.8 GB to someone over the internet, thats why a better solution is needed.