sndcrunch

A simple audio bit crunching tool.

To Build

You must first satisfy the dependencies. You need a C99 compiler and libsndfile. On Debian-based systems, you can get these like so:

# apt-get install build-essential libsndfile1-dev

You also need Delwink's libpfxtree. Follow its instructions for installation.

sndcrunch uses a simple build process: $ make

To Install

After building (see above):

# make install

Using sndcrunch

The most basic usage is an input and output file:

$ sndcrunch infile.wav outfile.wav

The formats supported by sndcrunch are:

AIFF with the extensions aif and aiff
AU with the extensions au and snd
CAF with the extension caf
FLAC with the extension flac
Ogg Vorbis with the extension ogg
WAV with the extensions wav and wave
XI with the extension xi

The trickiest part of using sndcrunch is setting the right loss level. It can be set using the -l option as so:

$ sndcrunch -l 5 infile.flac outfile.ogg

Each sound input seems to have its own "sweet spot" where the output is most ideal. A loss level too high produces unpleasant noise, and a loss level too low just makes a scratchy version of the original. The default loss level is 10 which seems to be a decent level for human speech sounds, which is the original purpose of this program.

The minimum loss level of 1 would actually leave the input unaltered. Since any combination of the input and output extensions is allowed, you could actually use sndcrunch as a simple audio converter if you wanted, but it only outputs 16-bit audio, so it would not be the ideal transcoder.

For more information on sndcrunch's CLI, use -h.

Hacking

Match the style you see in the code. Do not use spaces for indentation.

License