OneTaskBy Tim King · Updated
Waveform Image Generator
Soundwave Art From Audio for Instagram Stories or a Banner, With Caption
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How the Waveform Image Generator works
This waveform image generator runs entirely in your browser. Drop a song, a podcast clip or a voice message, pick a social size and a style, choose your colours and press Preview to see the image drawn over the waveform panel. Drag on the panel first if you only want a section of the audio in the picture. Export saves a PNG at the full size. The audio never leaves your browser.
How the waveform image generator works
The waveform viewer draws an accurate picture of a file for looking at. This tool draws a decorative one for showing off: the bar-style soundwave you see on podcast promos, audiogram stills, voice-message artwork and "sound of your name" prints.
How the bars are made. The selected audio is divided into as many slices as there are bars, and each bar's height is the loudness of its slice, measured as RMS rather than peak so a single click does not dominate. Heights are scaled so the loudest bar fills the wave height, which means a quiet recording still produces a full-looking image. Fewer bars give the chunky look used at small sizes; two hundred or more starts to resemble a real waveform.
Styles. Rounded bars are centred on the midline with pill ends, the most common social look. Sharp bars are the same layout with square ends. Bottom-up anchors every bar to a baseline, which reads as a level meter or a city skyline and suits banners. Bar width is set as a percentage of the space each bar occupies, so 100 makes a solid block and 30 makes thin lines.
Colour. The bars take one colour, or a gradient between two colours running across the image or from top to bottom. A transparent background produces a PNG you can place over a photo or a brand colour in another editor. The optional caption sits in a strip above the wave in the caption colour.
Played position. Setting a percentage dims everything after that point, the way a player does mid-track. It is a small touch that makes a still look like a playing clip in a feed.
Sizes cover the common feed and header shapes. Every export is a lossless PNG at the stated pixel size, so it can be posted directly or brought into a video editor as a layer.
FAQ
Can I use only part of the song?
Yes. Drag across the waveform panel to select a range before pressing Preview; the image is drawn from that range only. Drag the handles apart again to use the whole file.
Why does the preview look squashed?
The preview panel is a fixed wide shape and the image is fitted into it. The exported PNG has the exact proportions of the size you chose.
Can I make it look like a real waveform?
Set the bars high, the bar width to 100 and the style to sharp bars. For an accurate, per-sample rendering with a time ruler, use the waveform viewer instead.
Does it animate?
No; this makes a still image. An audiogram tool or video editor is needed to animate the bars with the audio. A still exported here does work as the cover frame or thumbnail for that video, since it is drawn from the same audio at the same size.
See also: all Audio tools, Images, Video & Screen, PDF, SVG, Simulations & Screensavers, Generative Art, Chart Makers, 3D Model Viewers, Drawing Pads, Mockups & 3D Making, Diagram Makers, 3D Science, Tracker Music.
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