soundmeter 0.1.1

Simple real-time sound meter.

SoundMeter is a command-line tool to obtain sound power in real time. It basically turns the audio recording functionality into a sound meter for machines that ship with microphones. It currently reveals the root-mean-square (RMS) of sound fragments, which is a measure of the power in an audio signal.

Features

• A command-line meter that supports triggering upon events

• Monitor API for backend module programming

Dependencies

System packages

On Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev python-dev alsa-utils

On Fedora/RHEL:

$ sudo yum install portaudio-devel python-devel alsa-utils

PyPI packages

• argparse

• pyaudio

• pydub

• python-daemon

Installation

You can install with pip:

$ pip install soundmeter

Or, you can download a source distribution and install with these commands:

$ python setup.py install

Usage

The simplest usage is to run soundmeter from command-line without any options:

$ soundmeter

Collect RMS values for 10 seconds so that you will know the sound level in the current environment:

$ soundmeter --collect --seconds 10
Collecting RMS values...
   154  Timeout
Collected result:
    min:        152
    max:        211
    avg:        156

You can set trigger and action for soundmeter.

Stop the soundmeter if RMS is greater than 211 consecutively for 3 times:

$ soundmeter --trigger +211 3 --action stop

Execute trigger.sh if RMS is greater than 211:

$ soundmeter --trigger +211 --action exec --exec trigger.sh

Execute trigger.sh and stop soundmeter if RMS is less than 152 consecutively for 3 times:

$ soundmeter --trigger -152 3 --action exec-stop --exec trigger.sh

Run the soundmeter with trigger and action in the background:

$ soundmeter --trigger +211 3 --action exec --exec trigger.sh --daemonize

Run the soundmeter for 2 minutes and log to meter.log:

$ soundmeter --seconds 120 --log meter.log

Command-line Options

The “soundmeter” command accepts the following options:

-c, --collect

collect RMS values to determine thresholds

-s SECS, --seconds SECS

time in seconds to run the meter (default forever)

-a ACTION_TYPE, --action ACTION_TYPE

triggered action (stop, exec-stop and exec)

-t THRESHOLD, --trigger THRESHOLD

trigger condition (threshold RMS and an optional number of consecutive triggering times, which defaults 1)

-e FILE, --execute FILE

shell script to execute upon trigger (defaults to ~/.soundmeter/trigger.sh)

-d, --daemonize

run the meter in the background

--log LOGFILE

log the meter (defaults to ~/.soundmeter/log)

-v, --verbose

verbose mode

--segment SECONDS

audio segment length recorded in seconds (defaults to 0.5)