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Jose Guzman edited this page Feb 22, 2014 · 2 revisions

Stimfit is a free, fast and simple program for viewing and analyzing electrophysiological data. It's currently available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It features an embedded Python shell that allows you to extend the program functionality by using numerical libraries such as NumPy and SciPy. A standalone Python module for file i/o that doesn't depend on the graphical user interface is also available.

We'd appreciate if you could cite the following publication when you use Stimfit for your research:

Guzman SJ, Schlögl A, Schmidt-Hieber C (2014) Stimfit: quantifying electrophysiological data with Python. Front Neuroinform doi: 10.3389/fninf.2014.00016

Supported file types

  • Read/write: CFS binary data, HDF5 files, Axon text files, ASCII files
    
  • Read-only: Axon binary files versions 1 and 2 (pClamp 9 and 10, *.abf), Axograph files (*.axgd, *.axgx), HEKA files (*.dat, from version 0.10)
    
  • Write-only: Igor binary waves (*.ibw) 
    

Support for other file types may be implemented upon request.

Building and installing for Windows

The Windows version, including the python-stfio module, is available here.

Building and installing for OS X

Stimfit for OS X is available through MacPorts. After installation, run

$ sudo port install stimfit py27-stfio

We don't supply installation packages for OS X any longer because of fragmentation issues with OS X versions (10.5--10.9), Python versions (2.x, 3.x) and architectures (i386, x86_64, ppc).

Debian and Ubuntu systems

You can get Stimfit and the stfio module from the standard repositories:

$ sudo apt-get install stimfit python-stfio

More recent versions can be found on the Debian Neuroscience Repository, and there's a bleeding-edge ppa for Ubuntu on launchpad.

Build from source

The source code for the latest release can be obtained from this ppa. Or you can get the latest source from our git repository. Detailed building instructions for GNU/Linux are part of the on-line documentation. Build instructions for OS X can be found here.

Questions and comments can be posted to the Google group.