viz of sparse graphical data / selecting out of layer / large overlay hangs

[ravelite]

Greetings,

First, thanks for making such nice tool for researching with sound and sound data!

I have a concatenative synthesizer, and have been exporting overlays (*.svl) with intermediate information from the synthesis algorithms in Matlab. The overlays are for viewing with the synthesized sound, for debugging and visualization purposes.

The data itself is sparse (just a few non-zero values to display for each analysis frame) and graphical (there are connections or non-connections or special connections between nodes in subsequent analysis frame). It looks sort of like this (out.svgz). The timeline in the displayed file is given on the right, and the bubbles are synthesis frames denoting (time in source file, transposition in semitones, and gain).

What I’ve done so far:

For showing where tracks start and end, I’m using the “regions” display layer. This works fine and will not be discussed. (regions.gif)
For showing details of individual synthesis atoms, I’m attempting to use “time values” layers. This has limited success and is discussed onward (tracks.gif).

Within a display layer, connections between time values can set to be connected or disconnected for the entire layer by setting plotStyle="0” (disconnected) or plotStyle="2" (connected). For my application, this necessitates each connected track being in its own layer. In my application, there are hundreds of these per input file.

The slight hindrances are:

1. If you manage to load the input file (svl in instants1.zip), you end up something that visualizes well (the various tracks are plotted correctly). But when you hover to see detail with the Navigate hand, it won’t be accessible unless it is the selected layer, and you have no good way to find and go to the correct layer.

If it were possible to pick points outside of the current layer with Navigate, this might be fixed.

(Update: this turns out to not be a big deal. "Time values" points are limited to two Attributes, so there's nothing in the Detail view that is not already showing when you fully zoom in on a point. Unless you need to edit the time values, you have no need to select the layer.)

If you need to select the layer, I would recommend using the Layer Summary to find the correct layer (using the Name). Optimally, double clicking the layer in Layer Summary would change to the selected layer. (double clicking doesn't seem to be currently linked to anything.) layerSummary2.png

2. When there are too many layers (svl in instants2.zip), Sonic Visualizer crashes hangs for a long time, but seems to be completely stable once everything is loaded. In addition, if you close the program or even delete a single layer (Ctrl-D) it also hangs, it eventually returns from the latter but the former seems to take on the same order, minutes, as it takes to load the overlay file.

This could be related to the way SV-XML allocates new layers on demand. Perhaps there is a way to optimizing loading of large overlay files, or perhaps some feedback to the UI (even a progress bar) would improve this process for the user.

In the Debug build, I kept getting the message "WARNING: SV-XML: Layer id x in view section has not been defined -- defining it here", but I couldn't find an obvious way to fix it.

Note: file attachments don't seem to be working on the forum, I got some kind of error about trouble accessing upload directory.
Here are my referenced files:
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/out.svgz
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/instants1.zip
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/instants2.zip
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/regions.gif
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/tracks.gif
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/layerSummary2.png
www.dtic.upf.edu/~gcoleman/sv/latestLayers.png

best regards,

Graham Coleman
PhD Student
Music Technology Group
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona