Generate an audio waveform image
Draw the waveform of a track as a PNG, in the colour and style you pick.
Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Podcast artwork, a thumbnail for an audio post, an overlay for a video of a track playing: all of them want a picture of the sound, and all of them are usually made by screenshotting an editor. This draws one properly instead.
The picture comes from the samples rather than from a player. Every one of them is decoded and reduced to the loudest and quietest value in each of sixteen hundred columns, which is what a waveform actually is — not a screenshot of a waveform display at whatever zoom it happened to be at.
Bars or a filled shape, any colour, and a transparent background for anything going over a design. The output is a 1600 by 400 PNG, which is large enough for a header image and scales down to a thumbnail without turning into mush. A stereo file is averaged into one waveform, because two channels drawn on top of each other is noise rather than information.
Step by step
- 1Drop in the audio.
- 2Pick a style, a colour and what goes behind it.
- 3Press Save PNG.
Questions
Can I get a transparent background?
Yes, and it is the default. The chequerboard behind the preview is the page showing you where the transparency is; the PNG itself has none of it.
Why is it one waveform for a stereo file?
The channels are averaged. Two waveforms drawn over each other are nearly identical on most material and read as noise rather than as information.
How long can the file be?
Every sample is decoded, so a very long recording takes proportionally longer. An hour-long podcast is a matter of seconds; the progress bar shows where it is.