After months of development, we're excited to announce Sound Scape Explorer v14.0 - a complete architectural overhaul with major improvements to usability, performance, and stability.

What's New​

JSON Configuration (Finally!)​

The biggest change: Excel spreadsheets are gone. Campaign configuration now uses JSON files with a modern React-based interface featuring guided workflows and contextual inline help. This enables:

• Step-by-step guidance reducing cognitive load
• Better validation and error messages
• Version control friendly configurations
• Programmatic campaign generation
• Easier sharing and collaboration

Legacy v13 .xlsx configurations can still be imported through the new Campaign module.

Expanded Neural Network Support​

Processing now supports multiple neural extractors:

• VGGish
• PERCH
• SurfPERCH
• YAMNet
• BirdNET
• Music Classifier
• Plus scikit-maad acoustic indices for traditional analysis
• Automatic model downloading via Kaggle and GitHub integration

Multiple extractors can be concatenated in a single extraction for richer embeddings.

Modern Tech Stack​

Processing CLI:

• Migrated to Python 3.11
• Replaced PyTorch with TensorFlow (with CUDA acceleration for Linux and Windows WSL2)
• New CLI flags: --validate, --auto, --cpu, --memory
• Better handling of configuration errors and OOM events
• Improved performance and memory management

Visualisation:

• Spatial selection boxes for 3D filtering
• Enhanced audio player with dynamic spectrograms
• Better heatmap interactions for data exploration
• Improved scatter coloring with acoustic indicators
• Redesigned UI components

Standalone app:

• Running all other modules: Campaign, Audio, Visualisation
• Electron 39 upgrade with Wayland support on Linux

Quality of Life​

• Comprehensive documentation with screenshots and video tutorials
• Automatic update notifications in standalone app
• Rewritten trajectory implementation with improved visualisation
• Consistent Leq values in dBFS

Breaking Changes​

v14 uses a completely new configuration format and storage structure. Key changes:

• Configuration files are now JSON instead of Excel
• Storage paths and HDF5 structure have been updated
• Python 3.11 required (up from 3.10)
• Datasets must be regenerated with the new Processing CLI

The Campaign module includes a migration tool for importing v13 .xlsx configurations.

Testing and Quality​

This release includes comprehensive test coverage:

• End-to-end Playwright tests for UI interactions
• Processing pipeline integration tests
• CI/CD automation for cross-platform builds
• Security vulnerability patches throughout the stack

Getting Started​

• Installation: Installation Guide
• Quick Start: Quick Start Tutorial
• Migration: Campaign Configuration Guide
• Full Changelog: CHANGELOG.md

Acknowledgements​

Special thanks to the research teams at ENES (Équipe de Neuro-Éthologie Sensorielle) for their feedback and collaboration throughout this development cycle.

Sound Scape Explorer v14.0 is available now on GitHub Releases and PyPI.

• 🧮 Processing
  • Join paths correctly on Windows
  • Fallback to ffprobe audio reading when mutagen returns 0 duration from non standard header

Read CHANGELOG for SSE 13.10.3

This dual release adds mean distances matrices memory allocation limit as well as PCA and embeddings usage for required computations.

Please find more below.

This dual release adds decile based deviation for relative trajectories, to both SSE and CSE.

Please find more below.

This dual release adds new nn-based extractors to both SSE and CSE.

While the new CSE 1.1.0 only features these two new extractors, SSE 13.8.0 continues to improve on its own with new features, performance improvements and bug fixes.

Please find more below.

🎉 Version 13.7.0 has been released!

• 👁️‍🗨️ Visualisation
  • Add audio analyzer for peak detection
  • Add audio loading state overlay
  • Add improved audio gain staging
  • Add optional scatter highlight for selected interval
  • Improve temporal x axis legends
  • Improve user settings saving consistency
  • Improve data generation performance
  • Improve render cycles

Read CHANGELOG for 13.7.0

🎉 Version 13.6.1 has been released!

• 👁️‍🗨️ Visualisation
  • Upgrade to Vue 3.4
  • Use Shift+Tab to cycle through draggables backwards
  • Use Enter submission on temporal filter thresholds
  • Add dev settings for automatic view selection
  • Add undo and redo actions to trajectories
  • Add undo and redo actions to audios
  • Fix cycling scale colors
  • Use temporal filtering for scatter CSV exports
  • Improve Menu and Draggables readability
  • Improve global lifecycle calls
  • Prevent using keyboard on view loading
  • Purge temporal thresholds on view unloading
  • Add various improvements and fixes
  🧮 Processing
  • Force string conversion from storage

Read CHANGELOG for 13.6.1

Read CHANGELOG for 13.6.0

🎉 Version 13.5.2 has been released!

• 👁️‍🗨️ Visualisation
  • Prevent label range coloring from hanging scatter colors
  • Prevent color map inverts with non reversible categories

Read CHANGELOG

🎉 Version 13.5.0 has been released!

• 👁️‍🗨️ Visualisation
  • Add point filtering to Temporal draggable
  • Add options and value range for indicator based coloring
  • Add range coloring for numeric user labels
  • Add color map inversion button
  • Add global <Escape> keyboard shortcut to toggle menu and draggables display
  • Add global <Tab> keyboard shortcut to cycle through active draggables
  • Add global x keyboard shortcut to close the current draggable
  • Persist user settings between sessions
  • Switch default coloring flavor (map) from Dark2 to Spectral
  • Add option to disable automatic Audio open on scatter click
  • Update keyboard shortcut mapping (see help)
  • Rename Indicators draggable to Temporal
  • Improve common draggable interfaces
  • Improve overall user experience
  • Improve overall code quality
  • Add security checks to Audio submodule
  • Update h5wasm dependency
  • Add various fixes and improvements

Read CHANGELOG

🎉 Version 13.4.3 has been released!

• 👁️‍🗨️ Visualisation
  • Force cell objects to strings for audio service start
  • Sanitize relative file paths when building interval details

Read CHANGELOG