Re: [Sv1-devel] Antw: What is the data being exported?

[Chris C. <ca...@al...>]

Hi Paul, Rainer -

On Fri, 29 Nov 2019, at 15:25, Rainer Josef SCHWOB wrote:
> "Export Audio to Data File" does not save the Spectogram or another 
> analysis, but the original audio data. I'm not sure for whom this 
> feature was created as it results in very, very big text files with 
> exactly the same information as in the previously loaded binary .wav 
> file (but if you export ca. 1 sec., import it in Excel and make a line 
> chart there, you can see the waveform).

As your example suggests, it's mostly useful for exporting very short selections for analysis in some non-audio tool, rather than exporting the whole of a long audio file.

There is currently no way to export the contents of a spectrogram layer. Depending on the type of spectrogram, you may be able to run it in a plugin and then export the contents of the 3d plot layer that shows the plugin output.

This is undoubtedly a feature that ought to be there. There are a couple of reasons why it wasn't added at the same time as exporting other kinds of layer.

One is tediously technical - the export function exports whatever internal model the layer is formally a view of, but the spectrogram layer is formally another view of the waveform data (it just uses another model for conversion internally) so a naive implementation would end up exporting time-domain data rather than spectrograms!

Another line of thought was just that spectrogram data may be rather large to be exported as text. But that was before the ability to export plain audio as text was added, and that's of a similar size. And of course any plugin can produce equally bulky output that can be exported.


Chris