Wavb - A wav file test tone generator utility.

Project Page Link

News

- 15 Oct 2004 – newer version improves the file creation process – using default settings and auto-increment indexing allow the creation of a set of tests with relatively few mouse clicks.

- 17 Sept 2004 – second released version. Added voice announcement of frequencies (voice from festival speech package, speex for compression, and resampler taken from resampler package). Also added frequency sweeps.

- 3 Sept 2004 – first version. Just tones, no other features yet. Speech synthesis without a lot of supporting files a bit difficult, but in progress.

Background

Just a plain utility for creating test tones in wav file format – useful for creating test CDs. There are many test tone generators and test files available so this one aims to be simple to use, precise in the generation of waveforms, and optionally insert speech synthesized pre-ambles and equipment set-up tones so that audible cues provides information on the test tone. For example, a voice annoucing “200 Hertz” would let the listener know the frequency of the tone following. The voice would be synthesized from the information in the program.

Related projects by this author: wava – utility for comparing wav files (currently at the bit level, not the perceptual level.)

Screenshot

Illustration 1Test Tone Screenshot













Work to be done at this stage includes:

Goals:

The development steps for this project include:

  1. Setup of a development environment and development of basic functions. This is a learning about writing a wav file and using the GUI interface. The FLTK library was chosen as it functions on both Win32 and Linux platforms.

  2. Compile to generate executables on both Linux and win32 platforms.

  3. As a utility, it should stand by inself with no libraries or supporting files.

  4. Adding speech synthesis. Plan on using 'festival' to generate the voice and “speex” to compress to code that can be embedded into the source code. “resample” will likely be necessary to convert the 16kHz speech rate data to the wav file frequency.

  5. Simple built in help file.

Current Limitations:

  1. Restricted to 44.1ksample/second stereo wav files with just one DATA section.

Inspiration for the project:

Wanted to create a test CD, but found that tools for generating test tones are either part of larger complex package or did not have source code available. The source code part is desirable because I wanted precise information on the generation of the test waveforms as part of further audio test software development.