Spectromatic 1.0 review

Spectromatic is a program for generating spectrograms from audio files

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 9K Developer: Daniel Franklin

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Spectromatic is a program for generating spectrograms from audio files. Spectrograms are a form of simple time-frequency analysis which lets you see how the distribution of energy at different frequencies in an audio stream change over time. For example, if you play a scale on a musical instrument, you will see a climbing and/or descending pattern of blobs as you move from left to right.

Spectromatic reads its input as mono or stereo 16-bit wave files, and writes the output image to an elongated PNG image (colour for stereo, grayscale for mono audio).

It's very easy. First make sure you have the GNU scientific library (GSL) version 1.0 installed (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/), and the PNG library version 2 or later (version 3 is untested, but should work - version 1.x may also work) plus the development versions of these libraries (i.e. the header files etc. - Debian calls these packages libgsl0-dev and
libpng2-dev). If you wish to change the default installation directory, edit the Makefile. Then type "make" followed by "make install". Easy!

To using it may be a bit harder. Refer to the man page for detailed instructions, but basically:

1. get a 16-bit mono or stereo wave file
2. spectromatic file.wav
3. this generates file.png which is the spectrogram. There are lots of options to change the way it generates the image (I recommend spectromatic --inverse --logarithmic --combine LXR file.wav).