Soundview

High-performance music visualizer

Renders whatever audio is playing on your system to a combined spectrum analyzer and scrolling voiceprint. Perceptive scaling ensures that the result accurately reflects the audio. Accelerated graphics result in very low CPU usage.

Screenshots

soundview horizontal screenshot
(video)

soundview vertical screenshot
(video)

Install/Quickstart

Install a recent version of SDL2 and Rust/cargo, then build and run the latest release:

$ cargo install soundview $ ~/.cargo/bin/soundview

Several optional arguments can be found by running ~/.cargo/bin/soundview -h.

Viewing local audio

Soundview can look at any audio "recording" device on your system, either using the `--device` argument or by pressing the rightarrow/leftarrow keys to rotate between devices.

Out of the box, many systems only have input devices for microphone/line-in. In this situation, visualizing the audio that is playing on the system requires installing a virtual recording device. There are many options for doing this, depending on what operating system you are using.

Linux: Out of the box, PipeWire and PulseAudio should have input devices named Monitor of [x]. If you point Soundview to these Monitor devices, you should be able to visualize any playing audio. On startup, Soundview defaults to devices that have "Monitor of" in their name.
OSX: BlackHole is free and should work, but we haven't tried it ourselves. You should be able to point Soundview to the virtual BlackHole device.
Windows: VB-CABLE is donationware and should work, but we haven't tried it ourselves. You should be able to point Soundview to the virtual VB-CABLE device.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keys	Action
`Q`/`Esc`	Exit
`F`/`F11`	Toggle Fullscreen (use `--fullscreen` to enable on startup)
`R`/`Space`	Rotate between vertical/horizontal modes (use `--orientation` to configure on startup)
`Right`/`Left`	Switch to next/prev device (use `--device` to select on startup)

Building from `main`

To build the latest unreleased code, download and build from git as follows:

$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~nickbp/soundview $ cd soundview $ cargo build && ./target/debug/soundview # debug build $ cargo build --release && ./target/release/soundview # release build

License/Credits

This project is licensed under the FAFOL. This is intended to restrict use of the project for purposes that would be considered unethical by its authors.

Site style is based on Element CSS

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and appreciated. Contributions must be provided under the license terms described above.