Goofing with Audio

Husband's doing some speech analysis stuff, and introduced me to sox, a self-described "Swiss Army Knife of sound processing." I was goofing with it today to convert spectrograms of mp3s to animated GIFs. This is quick and very dirty, but should work.

Requirements

On Ubuntu, install sox, the mp3 plug-in for sox, and imagemagick:

sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-mp3 imagemagick

Running

1. Copy the text of this crappy script into a file:
   #!/bin/bash
   # Get input file
   audiofile=$1
   
   if [ -z $1 ]; then
   echo "No mp3 file provided. Use ./makemeasammich /path/to/mymp3.mp3"
   exit 1;
   fi
   # Get seconds in audio file
   s=`sox "$audiofile" -n stat 2>&1 |grep Length |awk '{print $3}'`
   seconds=`echo $s/1 |bc`
   echo $audiofile is $seconds seconds long
   slice=0
   while [ $slice -lt $seconds ]
   do
   echo "Processing seconds starting at: $slice"
   sox "$audiofile" -n remix -r trim $slice spectrogram
   mv spectrogram.png $slice.png
   slice=`expr $slice + 9`
   done
   for i in `ls *.png`; do convert $i $i.gif; done;
   #use colors 32 to compress a bit
   convert -colors 32 -delay 100 -loop 1 *.gif $audiofile_animated.gif
   
   


2. Run the script like so:
   sh makemeasammich.sh /home/jenisgoofy/mysong.mp3
   

   And you should get something like the following, except it'll be larger and animated (BlogSpot doesn't support animated GIFs and I'm too lazy to copy this anywhere right now):

   

   You can change the convert line to change animation/looping settings; removing "colors -32" will give you better quality (much larger filesize).