Display axis decorators: seconds, ms

Description

We currently support two temporal decoration modes: time and lag. These modes use seconds as the underlying data representation, and the TimeFormatter object adaptively scales the units to an appropriate resolution given the display range.

It would be good to be able to override this, and display in fixed units. This could be easily done by adding a couple of new modes:

• seconds: always use seconds
• ms: always use milliseconds
• lag_seconds: always use seconds (including negative for lag)
• lag_ms: as above, but for milliseconds.

Implementing this is simply a matter of adding some control logic to the TimeFormatter, and adjusting the automatic axis labels to Time (s) or Time (ms) accordingly.

[bmcfee]

I agree that sticking to seconds as much as possible and keeping things not too complicated is the way to go.

This sounds good to me.

When the referenced “sample plotting” function is implemented, we can consider adding ms as the minimum unit only for that sample plotting function but probably not specshow.

I’d prefer things to be consistent across the board, but we can always generalize later on if we decide it’s necessary.

Beside this problem, I think most things are clear. Any other thoughts? 😃

Nope, i think we’re good to get cracking on this!

[lostanlen]

Yes, 3 digits looks good. 999 seconds is ~16 minutes, which will cover the overwhelming majority of use cases. I work in bioacoustics, where we may have 4-digit and even 5-digit audio recordings (up to 24 hour long), but typically I would use the adaptive format rather than the seconds format to display those recordings.