Spectromatic

Spectromatic is a powerful software designed to generate spectrograms from audio files with ease. It specializes in offering a form of simple time-frequency analysis that showcases how the distribution of energy at different frequencies in an audio stream changes over time. For instance, if a scale is played on a musical instrument, the user will observe a climbing and/or descending pattern of blobs from left to right.

The software reads its input as mono or stereo 16-bit wave files and writes the output image to an elongated PNG image, with color for stereo and grayscale for mono audio. In order to get started with this software, the user needs to make sure that they have the GNU scientific library (GSL) version 1.0 and the PNG library version 2 or later installed. If you wish to change the default installation directory, all you need to do is edit the Makefile, and then type "make" followed by "make install."

Using the software might be a bit harder for some people, but the software comes with a detailed man page with step-by-step instructions. The software can be easily used by following three simple steps: get a 16-bit mono or stereo wave file, spectromatic file.wav, and this will generate file.png, which is the spectrogram.

Spectromatic offers a myriad of options to change the way it generates the image. For instance, there are options like spectromatic --inverse --logarithmic --combine LXR file.wav that users can take advantage of to get better image results. Overall, Spectromatic is a reliable and powerful software for generating spectrograms that comes with a user-friendly interface and easy-to-follow instructions.