Snack Sound Toolkit

Snack Sound Toolkit is a solution that adds commands for sound play/record and sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It supports in-memory sound objects, file based audio, streaming audio, WAV, AU, AIFF, and MP3 file formats, synchronous and asynchronous playback. The visualization canvas item types update in real-time and can output PostScript. New commands and file formats can be added using the Snack C-API.

Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file and socket I/O. Snack also provides primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals.

The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.

Features:

• High level sound objects, with flexible storage management and streaming support.
• Multiple simultaneous playback and recording threads (system dependent).
• All audio data handled as floating point internally for fast and accurate computations.
• Multi-platform, same scripts usable on Windows 95/98/NT/2K/XP, Linux, Macintosh, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and SGI IRIX.
• Script compilation tool included, for easy deployment using stand-alone executables.
• Filters which can be used to process sound objects or during playback for on-the-fly operation.
• Visualization with waveforms, spectrograms, and spectrum sections.
• Postscript support.
• Real-time visualization/spectrum analysis.
• Web enabled, possible to run scripts embedded in web pages through the use of the Tcl plug-in.
• Extensible, new commands, filters, and sound file formats can be added using the Snack C-library.
• Lots of examples included as well as a skeleton C-extension.
• Supported sound file formats: WAV, AU, AIFF, MP3, CSL, SD, SMP, and NIST/Sphere

Requirements:

• Tcl and Tk
• Python