Something came up at work a few months ago, a project that required converting audio, from a .wav or .mp3 file, into an image, a waveform like on an oscilloscope, or as shown in a track in a music editor. The project wasn't my project, but that particular part of it sounded interesting. If there wasn't any off-the-shelf solution, wouldn't it be easy to write a small program to do it? We were all busy with other things, and shoved it all to the back burner. Well, actually it fell off behind the stove and got covered with greasy dust bunnies.

Last week we came upon the idea again, and i'm intrigued enough with the idea of converting audio into images, that i thought about it a little, and decided what the heck, it will be fun to sit down and create something. I started monday evening, sketched out the whole plan for the software and coded quite a bit. It's for Windows only, for now. There's a DLL to do the actual number crunching, a GUI app for easy use, and a command line program, with no GUI, for to call from perl/php/ruby scripts. The DLL has a clean simple API and could be used directly by programs written with tools that can access DLLs.

If not this pet project software, and if not something off the shelf, the way to accomplish the task might be to load the .wav file into an editor such as Ardour or Cakewalk Sonar and do screen captures. That would be hard to automate. I've never heard of a sound editor that could save images of the waves it's showing; that's just not what people get these editors for. Probably not practical.

Probably it won't get used for the particular project at work, since that project isn't a top priority one and could just as well be dropped. But this software i'm making might be of use to others. I plan to put it on SourceForge once it's in some kind of decent shape.

It has been fun to exercise my rusty Windows API skills. Though Windows is not my favorite environment to program in, it certainly is practical to have the knowledge and experience. One more interesting project on the resume.

Between the full-time job, this pet project for the evenings, and miscellaneous relaxation fun and survival, i'm also doing more colored pencil artwork than usual. Another rusty skill i've put off, resuming making good use of.

If there's any pattern to the several things i'm doing, it's this: staying indoors! The weather has been very cold a long time, and even colder air is swooshing down from Canada this weekend. I shall get a lot done the next few days.