Is there a way to view the track as a waveform?
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Hi everyone,
I’m coming from a player called Resonic Player and one of the features there is the ability to view a full waveform of the audio track you're playing. This is super helpful because it makes navigating songs very intuitive. Being able to see where the drop, chorus, or quiet parts are lets me jump exactly where I want just by scanning the waveform.
In Strawberry, I found some analyzer options under the Framerate menu like Block analyzer, Boom analyzer, Nyanalyzer Cat, Rainbow Dash, and Sonogram. These are fun and visually interesting, but none of them seem to show a traditional waveform of the entire track.
Is there a feature like that in Strawberry that I didnt see? Basically the ability to display the track as a waveform and jump to sections.
Thanks in advance
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@rikosi While this isn't exactly what you're looking for, enabling the moodbar feature and setting it to be displayed in the track progress bar does communicate what the track sounds like visually and lets you scrub through it. It does help signify changes to the track like the drop and quiet parts, although it's not quite as easy to interpret as a waveform.
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Following up on this — the moodbar workaround is a fair suggestion, but I think it is worth distinguishing because moodbar and a real waveform actually solve different problems/features. The moodbar shows the spectral "mood" of a track as a colour gradient, which is fine for a vibe, but the colour bands do not reliably correspond to where the loud parts, drops, breaks, or quiet sections are. As a DJ I find myself wanting to see the actual amplitude shape of the track — the peaks and troughs over time — so I can spot a drop, a build-up or a breakdown by eye in a few hundred milliseconds. Mixxx and most DJ-oriented tools display this as a horizontal waveform strip with a playhead, and it is hard to go back to scrubbing without one.
What I would propose for Strawberry is a proper waveform visualization that lives in the analyzer area above the progress bar, alongside Block, Boom, Turbine and the others, as just another option in the right-click "Analyzer" menu. Selecting it would render the loudness contour of the entire current track as a horizontal waveform, with a playhead moving across it as the song plays. It would not replace the moodbar (moodbar can stay exactly where it is, painted into the slider groove), and it would not replace the live spectrum analyzers either.
It would just be one more option in that menu, for the users who want it.
I had a look at the code and the feature seems quite feasible without adding any new dependency. The moodbar pipeline already handles the hardest part: running a GStreamer pre-pass over a track on a worker thread and caching the result. A waveform pipeline would essentially be the same pattern, but storing peak/RMS values instead of FFT-derived colours. Other parts of the engine (Chromaprint, EBU R128 loudness analysis) already extract raw PCM from GStreamer in the exact way a waveform would need.
I am planning to open a GitHub issue to gauge the maintainers' interest. Would anyone else here find this useful? Especially curious whether other DJs, or people working with mixes and live recordings, would back this up.