spettro

Spettro shows a scrolling spectrogram of music as it plays

Most spectrographic music players have a linear frequency axis, which dedicates the top half of the display to the top octave (11025Hz-22050Hz at CD quality), the next quarter of the screen to the penultimate octave and so on, leaving all the musically interesting information crushed into the bottom few rows of the graphic.

Linear frequency axis

Logarithmic frequency axis

Spettro has a logarithmic frequency axis, which allocates the same amount of space to each octave.

It can play most audio files (WAV, OGG, FLAC, MP3, M4A and even the soundtrack of videos) and shows a scrolling spectrogram of it with a vertical green one-pixel-wide line half way across the window to show the current playing position.

You can also:

Pause, continue, rewind and seek back and forth in the audio
Zoom in and out in time and in frequency
Adjust the brightness and dynamic range (contrast)
Change the FFT sample size to adjust the relative frequency/time resolution
Select from five different FFT window functions
Show where the ten score lines, six guitar strings or 88 piano keys fall
Position bar lines to help determine the rhythm
Add frequency and time axes
Increase the playing volume above 100%
Dump the current view to a PNG image file

spettro showing the start of Wish You Were Here, with all the axes turned on.
Had you ever noticed the rising and falling sine wave you can see at the top?

There is a screencast of it on YouTube

It is known to run on GNU/Linux and should be portable to Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Tizen.

Downloads

md5sum	File
a04aba60e8bba92b9d2585c5fc61a5e4	spettro-0.1.tar.gz
243001070f7c97bdfc6cbbc82c661872	spettro-0.1.zip

md5sum File a04aba60e8bba92b9d2585c5fc61a5e4 spettro-0.1.tar.gz 243001070f7c97bdfc6cbbc82c661872 spettro-0.1.zip

Or, for the latest development version,

git clone https://gitlab.com/martinwguy/spettro cd spettro sh autogen.sh ./configure make sudo make install

There are packages for Debian and Ubuntu under martinwguy.net/spettro/release and spettro is included in the "unstable" repository of deb-multimedia.org.

Planned features and improvements are listed in TODO, known bugs in BUGS.

Thanks

Thanks to Thomas Orgis and Christian Marillat for suggestions and to Bogdan Marinescu, Ian Utting and Craig Leinoff for testing release candidates.

Why "spettro"?

"spettro" is the first part of the Italian word for a spectrogram and means "spectre".

Martin Guy , December 2016 - January 2024.