How to see sound on the timeline as a wave and as a spectrogram?

ryan-hall34 wrote on 6/27/2025, 10:58 AM

Sound in Vegas is presented as waves, but I need it to be presented as waves and as a spectrogram at the same time, like in Audacity:

Sound in the form of a spectrogram is needed in Vegas, because work is carried out with many markers that are imported to the timeline in the following format: hours:minutes:seconds:frames. Therefore, other programs will not work for my work

Comments

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 6/27/2025, 1:01 PM

Not a perfect solution but you can render the audio clip into a spectrogram video clip and put that under the audio on the timeline. You should then see preview thumbs of the video under the audio track. They'll be be more discontinuous than the audio waveform but display accurately in the preview area. As you spread out the timeline scale they'll get more accurate in the clip area as you get closer to single-frame preview display.

john_dennis wrote on 6/27/2025, 5:55 PM

Are you familiar with setting the Vegas Ruler to Time and Frames...

and copying the marker locations from the Edit Details/Marker panel?

ryan-hall34 wrote on 6/28/2025, 2:10 AM

Are you familiar with setting the Vegas Ruler to Time and Frames...

and copying the marker locations from the Edit Details/Marker panel?

Yes, I know that the timeline format can be changed in the project settings, the division into time and frames is my default. The customer sends me audio with a duration of more than 8 hours and the attached txt files to them. There are markers written in these txt files that I have to work with. I copy these markers and paste them into the "Edit details" window. And to make it easier for me to work with these markers, I need the spectrogram of the sound to be visible.

rraud wrote on 6/30/2025, 11:41 AM

You could use a plug-in to view an event as a spectralgram but it would not display directly on the timeline

ryan-hall34 wrote on 7/6/2025, 3:53 AM

You could use a plug-in to view an event as a spectralgram but it would not display directly on the timeline

I tried several VST plugins that show a spectrogram, but they only show it in real time, which is not suitable for me. I found a program very similar to Vegas, it is called Reaper, you can import markers in it and most importantly there is a sound spectrogram

ryan-hall34 wrote on 7/6/2025, 3:59 AM

Not a perfect solution but you can render the audio clip into a spectrogram video clip and put that under the audio on the timeline. You should then see preview thumbs of the video under the audio track. They'll be be more discontinuous than the audio waveform but display accurately in the preview area. As you spread out the timeline scale they'll get more accurate in the clip area as you get closer to single-frame preview display.

Thanks for the possible solution, but I found a program very similar to Vegas, it's called Reaper, it can also import markers and most importantly it has a sound spectrogram

rraud wrote on 7/6/2025, 9:55 AM

but I found a program very similar to Vegas, it's called Reaper,

FYI, Justin Frankel (a WinAmp developer) was inspired by the early audio only Vegas to build Reaper. so it is similar in more than a few ways.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 7/6/2025, 5:32 PM

@ryan-hall34 You might also want to check out a program called SpectraLayers. I got it in a SoundForge bundle.