Hi, I'm looking for a program to visually render waveforms to high quality png's to be used for graphic design purposes. Most programs such as audacity have this, but they are pixelated and practically useless in this case, so I need something more geared towards viewing rather than actual editing.

Thanks, and best regards.

I too am looking for an application that does this. Be sure to let us know if you find one.

I don't know, but I have some thoughts...

I see lots of waveforms in books and on the web, so it's a very common thing for graphic artists/publishers to do... If nobody here knows of an audio program that can do it, I wonder if you'd get a better answer on a graphic arts or web-publishing forum????

Do you want to plot a real audio waveform (from a WAV file), or an artist's representation of an imaginary waveform?

I think an imaginary waveform would be the easiest way to go, and it seems like the kind of thing graphic artists do every day (with graphic-arts software). You could probably do it by drawing Bezier curves, or maybe your drawing program has a sine wave tool... If so, you could draw a sine wave and then stretch/squeeze/distort it to look like regular audio. I assume you could also do it with technical-drawing or CAD software.

You could also create an "imaginary" waveform with Excel (mathematically), and then plot it.

If you are making waveform from an actual WAV file, you need to decide if you want to see the raw digital data, which is stair-stepped (like you see in when you zoom-in with Audacity), or if you want to see the smoothed (filtered) analog representation.

A program like Matlab (or a Matlab clone) should be able to plot the raw data or create a smoothed-analog image from a WAV file. I don't have Matlab, but I understand that it can open WAV files, and that it has extensive graphing capability.

You can also find general-purpose graphing/plotting software or "data visualization" software. (I don't know how easy it is to get audio data from a WAV file into these programs.)

I'd imagine the "canonical" thing to do from a free software point of view would be to find some way to import the wav into gnuplot. Generate some PostScript and go to town.

Otherwise you could consider figuring out a way to display the waveform in a window far larger than your real window size (say 4096x4096), then taking a snapshot of that window in the GIMP, and downsampling it to smooth it out.

I think one can still download a trial copy of Adobe Audition. Its waveform display is quite good.

I used a technique for doing this sort of thing, and it was at least marginally useful. All I did was bring a screenshot of the waveform view from WaveLab into Adobe Illustrator and had it trace the paths. I then simplified the paths to reduce the complexity. The result was a fairly decent vector approximation of the waveform that required some minimal cleanup.

So long as you don't need great accuracy, this is a decent method.