songsee

songsee is a command-line tool designed to generate spectrograms and feature-panel visualizations from audio files. It solves the problem of audio analysis and visualization by providing a fast, straightforward way to create visual representations of sound characteristics. Whether you're analyzing a single track or examining specific time slices, songsee transforms audio data into informative visual outputs that reveal frequency content, temporal patterns, and acoustic features.

The tool offers comprehensive visualization capabilities through multiple panel types including spectrograms, mel-frequency representations, chroma features, harmonic-percussive source separation (HPSS), self-similarity matrices, loudness analysis, tempograms, MFCCs, and spectral flux. Users can customize output with various color palettes (classic, magma, inferno, viridis, gray), adjust FFT parameters through window and hop length settings, control frequency ranges, and specify output dimensions. The tool supports flexible input methods including direct file input or stdin piping, with native WAV/MP3 decoding and ffmpeg integration for additional formats.

songsee is ideal for audio engineers, music producers, researchers, and developers who need to analyze audio characteristics visually. Common use cases include quality assurance for audio processing pipelines, music information retrieval research, educational demonstrations of audio signal processing concepts, and debugging audio-related issues in applications. The ability to generate multi-panel grids makes it particularly valuable for comparative analysis and comprehensive feature extraction workflows.