Is there a free realtime spectrograph available for Ubuntu?

Question

On my home stereo I have a spectrograph that has a 2D matrix, whereby the X axis is the frequency (deep bass on the left, vocals in the center, treble on the right), and the Y axis is the volume or power of the sound at that frequency. I have seen things like this for Ubuntu, but they work on MP3 files or other pre recorded songs. Is there anything that can do this real time for a microphone attached or simply the system mixer?

Answer 1

This may be a bit overkill, but Baudline is an incredible real-time FFT spectrogram. It's not in Ubuntu repos, so you will need to download it on your own. It displays a real-time analysis of source signal, but it also allows to analyze pre-recorded data. The brightness of a point represent the power of the sound at this frequency, where horizontal axis represents frequencies, and vertical time - so it kind of shows history of your signal.

It's extensive features make it definitely the most advanced spectrogram available for Linux. It may be a bit too complicated for your uses, though. I am not sure what exactly you are looking for.

Answer 2

Jaaa

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/jaaa/+publishinghistory

The JACK & ALSA Audio Analyser, an audio signal generator and spectrum analyser.

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Glfer

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glfer/+publishinghistory

glfer is a GTK+ application with a waterfall spectrum display and slow CW (QRSS) / dual-frequency CW (DFCW) transmitter control interface. [ . . . ] The signal to be analyzed can be acquired in real-time from the sound card or can be read from a WAV file.

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Quisk

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/quisk/+publishinghistory

The Quisk receiver can read the sample data, tune it, filter it, demodulate it, and send the audio to the sound card for output to external headphones or speakers. The Quisk transmitter can accept microphone input and send that to your transmitter via a soundcard or Ethernet.

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Spek

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/spek/+publishinghistory

There is also Spek, although as of version 0.8.2 it does not work in realtime. However, there is a feature request and a pull request that may change this.

Spek (IPA: /spɛk/, ‘bacon’ in Dutch) helps to analyse your audio files by showing their spectrogram. Spek is free software available for Unix, Windows and Mac OS X.

Answer 3

Friture

Friture is a real-time audio analyzer. It works on Windows, macOS and Linux. It is free and open source.

Answer 4

Baudline still works perfectly fine in 2021, use 'parec' to pull in from Pulse.

parec --channels=2 --latency-msec=5 | baudline -stdin -channels 2

Then from within whatever you use to control pulse's audio source, select the app playing audio / the output device to record. It works.

Full res image

Answer 5

The sox tool is able to create a spectrogram:

sox Test.wav -n spectrogram -o Test.png

• example: https://thepenguin.eu/2017-09-27-create-spectrograms-with-sox/
• documentation with additional options: http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html

Answer 6

Another option is Audacity, a very powerful piece of audio software which supports spectrogram or waveform graphs, either in real time or from a pre-recorded. It is free, open source and cross-platform.

See the manual for how to get this view.

It should be noted that, at least on my laptop, the spectrogram lagged behind real time by a few seconds - if you need absolute real time, the best tool I have found is Friture, mentioned in another answer. However, I've ended up also using Audacity because Friture lacks the ability to analyse existing files.

Answer 7

Sonic Visualiser, initiated and developed in the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London.

• https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/
• https://packages.ubuntu.com/mantic/sonic-visualiser
• https://github.com/sonic-visualiser/sonic-visualiser

Answer 8

I just came across this python snippet searching for the exact same thing and it works quite great: https://gist.github.com/boylea/1a0b5442171f9afbf372

Really simple, you will need to install with pip3:

• numpy
• pyqtgraph
• pyaudio
• PyQt4

To get it work , I converted the line:

self.img_array = np.zeros((1000, CHUNKSZ/2+1))

to:

self.img_array = np.zeros((1000, math.floor(CHUNKSZ/2+1)))

to remove the float to int conversion error.

I then ran:

python3 script.py 

Here is a screenshot of the UI:

If you develop in Python, funny stuff can be added to this really cool base.