WaveformExtractor.run_extract_waveforms has to run on all units

Hi,

I want to extract the waveforms of multiple units, my understanding is to use the WaveformExtractor, set the parameters, and run run_extract_waveforms(). Except I’m not seeing a parameter to give which unit ids I want to extract, which means I need to extract the waveforms of all the units (which seems like a potential waste of time, and a lot of writing to disk when using max_spikes_per_unit=None).

In my use case, it wrote 298.7 GB to the disk (taking a few minutes) when extracting all of the waveforms (96 units) when I actually was only interested in 3 of them …

Is it made like this on purpose? Or is it something that needs to be added?

Thanks, Drade

[DradeAW]

Or you create a sub sorting with sorting.select_units and run another waveform extractor on it. sounds easier no ?

It’s easier if I only need a subset of units and that’s all. But often, I need to get the waveforms of a subset of units, and then depending on the result get the waveforms of a different subset of units.

Being able to run run_extract_waveforms multiple times of a different subset of units while always remembering the previous results could be a really nice feature I think.

[DradeAW]

Alright I understand!

I just thought that keeping track of units already computed could improve performance in certain use cases, but maybe it’s too niche or maybe it’s just too complicated as you say.