Although researchers are increasingly aware of the need to publish and maintain software code alongside their results, practical barriers prevent this from happening in many cases. We examine these barriers, propose an incremental approach to overcoming some of them, and describe the Sound Software project, an effort to support software development practice in the UK audio and music research community. Finally we make some recommendations for research groups seeking to improve their own researchers' software practice.

Sonic Visualiser is a friendly and flexible end-user desktop application for analysis, visualisation, and annotation of music audio files. Its stated goal is to be "the first program you reach for when want to study a musical recording rather than simply listen to it". To this end, it has a user interface that resembles familiar audio editing applications, a set of useful standard visualisation facilities, and support for a plugin format for additional automated analysis methods.