Linux Stereo Tone Generator: Best Tools and Libraries

audiolibraries

Is there something like a stereo (separate left-and right-channel) tone-generator for Linux? Where you can set volume and tone/pitch for each channel, and preferably also set the wave-form (sine, square, sawtooth, …) and invert one channel (as opposed to the other).

If not, any ideas for a good places to start to make one? I guess the simplest would be to adapt existing programs like synths… But if that work poorly, are there any libraries (like SDL?) that can be used as bases for such a program?

Best Answer

It sounds like you're looking for Audacity which is a cross-platform open source audio editor. One of its features is to allow you to generate tones. It's a multi-track audio editor, so you can easily create a stereo tone.

Under the Generate menu, you're able to create Sine, Sawtooth, and Square waveform tones of arbitrary frequency, amplitude, and length without the need for recording or needing additional input files.

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VLC surround to stereo problem

Downmixing/Adjust from 5.1 to 'true' 2.1

I use ALSA and Pulse Audio on my Arch Linux machine.

You want to control how downmixing to 2.0 is done, so you're going to define a custom sound device in /etc/asound.conf

You can use this output configuration:

(add the custom function to the file /etc/asound.conf)

pcm.51to20
{
  type route
  slave.pcm surround51
  slave.channels 6

  # Front and rear, at 33% of original signal strength
  ttable.0.0 0.33
  ttable.1.1 0.33
  ttable.2.0 0.33
  ttable.3.1 0.33

  # Center channel routing (routed to front-left and front-right),
  # 6dB gaindrop (gain half of main channels) per channel
  ttable.4.0 0.16
  ttable.4.1 0.16

  # LFE channel routing (routed to front-left and front-right),
  # 6dB gaindrop (gain half of main channels) per channel
  ttable.5.0 0.16
  ttable.5.1 0.16
}

Then in VLC

Go to the audio preferences

Tools -> Preferences -> Audio

Set Outputmodel to Alsa audio output

and

Set Device to Default ALSA Output (currently PulseAudio Sound Server)

Save and restart VLC

Audio tone/sine generator with frequency gauge

There is a program in the standard repos called siggen that can do this.

It has a curses interface, and you can increment or decrement the frequency with the arrow keys.

Since /dev/dsp is deprecated in most modern Linux distros, you will probably need to install a compatibility library. On Debian-based distros, install the alsa-oss package and run it like this:

$ aoss siggen

or with the PulseAudio OSS Wrapper like so:

$ padsp siggen

Best Answer

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Audio tone/sine generator with frequency gauge

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