viewwav

Very basic viewer for raw 16-bit, stereo wave files. I use it by piping the output of a command that produces raw audio to viewwav -, or, if the sample rate is not 44100 Hz, something like RATE=48000 viewwav -. Somewhat embarrassingly, this program does not have an actual GUI (it uses the Allegro game library) and cannot play or edit audio, only view it. It is however pretty good at revealing the overall dynamics of a song. And it's fast.

Screenshot viewing the track "Burning Wheel" by Primal Scream. Green is peak level, cyan is an RMS average that better reflects perceived loudness. The RMS display is off by default and is toggled by pressing 'r'.

Same track in logarithmic view, toggled by pressing 'l'. The distance between adjacent grey lines is 6dB. Here the cyan-colored RMS trace provides a good overview of the dynamics in a song (with the exception of very bass-heavy tracks where this can be deceiving).

Keys:

l: Toggle linear/logarithmic view
p: Toggle display of peak level
r: Toggle display of RMS level
Up/Down: Zoom in/out
Left/Right, PgUp/PgDn: Move backward/forward in time
Home/End: Jump to beginning/end of waveform
F4/F3: In linear view, zoom in/out vertically
Esc: Quit

License

Written by Scott Feeney scott@oceanbase.org, 2007-2008

This software and associated documentation files (the "Software") is released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, version 1.0, as published by Creative Commons. To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to the Software to the public domain worldwide. The Software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.

If you did not receive a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with the Software, see http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

graue/viewwav

viewwav

License