Introducing Spek

by Alexander Kojevnikov

I just released version 0.1 of Spek — a little program that shows spectrograms of audio files. Spek is written in Vala and uses the standard GNOME stack: GLib, GTK+, Cairo and GStreamer.

Spectrogram of a FLAC file

Spectrograms are used to analyse the quality of audio files, you can easily detect lossy re-encodes, web-rips and other badness by just looking at the spectrogram.

This version of Spek doesn’t do much apart from showing the actual spectrogram and allowing to save it as a PNG image. However, I plan to add a bunch of features before releasing version 1.0:

  • Windows port.
  • Horizontal (time) and vertical (frequency) rulers.
  • Zooming, scrolling and other adjustments.
  • Associate Spek with audio files to use it as a viewer.
  • Use multiple threads to speed-up processing.

You can download the tarball from the project’s website. To build and run:

$ tar -xjvf spek-0.1.tar.bz2
$ cd spek-0.1
$ ./configure
$ make
$ src/spek

Or `sudo make install` to have it installed.

Contribute

The code is available on Gitorious. I really need and will appreciate help in these areas:

  • Packaging
  • Translations
  • Review of autotools-related code

Why Vala?

I initially wanted to write Spek in Haskell to practice the language after reading The Haskell School of Expression (generously sent to me by Jorge). However, after writing a bit of code I realised that all the functional goodness of Haskell is not used at all because Spek is simply a bit of glue between GTK+ and GStreamer, with very little code of its own. Also, the prototype’s executable size of 14+ MiB didn’t help much in convincing myself that Haskell was a good pick for this project.

I was left with C and C#. The latter didn’t feel like a good idea for the same reasons: I wanted something lightweight for this small little app, C# would require a lot of dependencies. Also, while I really like C# as a language and Mono/.NET as a platform, I wanted to try something new for a change — I already use them full-time on my day job and when hacking Banshee.

I wrote very little C/C++ code since late 90′s, now I know why I didn’t miss it much — it’s so incredibly verbose! After a few hours I gave up, decided to do some research and found Vala :)

The impression so far is hugely positive. Vala still has a few rough edges but nothing too bad and not work-aroundable. If you are tired of using C for your GTK+ applications, definitely give it a try!