pulseviz is a small OpenGL-accelerated audio visualizer for PulseAudio written in Python. Right now it's more or less a proof of concept with little to no features.

Installation

pulseviz can be installed via pip3:

# System wide...
sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/pckbls/pulseviz.py.git

# ...or only for the current user
pip3 install --user git+https://github.com/pckbls/pulseviz.py.git

Usage

pulseviz requires you to choose an audio source and a visualizer type:

$ pulseviz
Usage: pulseviz <source> <visualizer>

Available sources:
    alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.monitor
    alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo
    alsa_output.usb-VIA_Technologies_Inc._USB_Audio_Device-00.iec958-stereo.monitor

Available visualizers:
    waveform
    spectrum
    bands

By default PulseAudio automatically creates a monitor source for each sink which can be used to visualize the audio that you are hearing. Those sources have a .monitor suffix.

Visualizations

Waveform Visualizer

The waveform visualizer shows the raw audio signal in the time domain.

Spectrum Visualizer

The spectrum visualizers transforms the audio signal into the frequency domain using a STFT.

Octave Bands Visualizer

The octave bands visualizer divides the frequency domain magnitudes into octave bands and displays the average magnitude of each band.

Future goals

• Make visualizers configurable
  • Either via command line switches...
  • ...or via configuration file
• Stereo support
• Create more visually appealing visualiziations such as
  • Spectrogram
  • Vectroscope/Stereometer for visualizing the correlation between multiple audio channels
  • Kodi's rotating 3D Spectrum visualizer.
  • Shadertoy visualization
  • projectM visualization
• Further improve performance
  • By off-loading rendering tasks onto the GPU using shaders
  • By reducing unnecessary memory copies
  • Maybe by rewriting the DSP algorithms in C
• Implement a GUI
  • Most likely based on GTK3
  • Ship two applications pulseviz (the original CLI version) and pulseviz-gtk
• Something for the far distant future: Support more audio sub systems and platforms.