320. Wsearch32 in Wine

Wsearch32 is a windows program that does what it's supposed to -- open mass spectrometer data files. Because our students use it quite a lot and to save me time in training them, here's how to install wsearch32 and how to get started with it. It runs almost perfectly in Wine.

One notable thing about Wsearch is that it opens HP Agilent Chemstation .D files without any problems. It's notable because different versions of HP Agilent Chemstation can't even open files written by other versions (yup, it's true...) of the same damned program.

Another obvious advantage of Wsearch is that it makes it very easy to export data, although it only exports one spectrum at a time (i.e. you can't get the full time-dependent data set).

WSearch was written by Frank Antolasic at the RMIT in Melbourne, Australia.


What doesn't work under Wine: It will freeze if you try to open several files at the same time. This does not happen on native Windows.

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Installation
Download it from here: http://www.wsearch.com.au/

wget http://www.wsearch.com.au/wsearch32/wsearch32.zip
unzip wsearch32.zip

and follow the instructions:

There's nothing odd about the installation process

It works as well as under windows

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Screenshots

This is the default view

Click on the import icon (the red one in the left corner), and select your file. There are plenty of supported formats.

This is the TIC view. Click anywhere on the TIC to get the corresponding spectrum

TIC and spectrum view.

Click on the M/I icon on the right to get a list of all the data in the spectrum plot..

You can then save the spectrum in a range of ascii based formats.

You can get the acquisition headers under Chromatogram/List header info. You can also make ion plots  in the same menu.

Wsearch also comes with a simple isotopic pattern calculator.

The Help works fine under linux/wine

This is the free version of wsearch -- there is some functionality missing.