SPECTUI is a compact terminal audio visualizer written in C. It plays audio via PortAudio and decodes files with libsndfile, computes real‑time FFTs with FFTW (single precision), and renders a live spectrum using ncurses (menu + panel). The app is lightweight and intended for terminals.

• Play WAV files and visualize spectrum in real time
• Ringbuffer-backed producer/consumer audio pipeline
• Hanning windowed FFT running in a background thread
• Simple ncurses menu for basic actions

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libportaudio-dev libsndfile1-dev libfftw3-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

Arch-Based:

sudo pacman -S base-devel portaudio sndfile fftw ncurses

1. Build

make

2. Install (optional):

sudo make install

3. Uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

Run with a audio file:

./spectui <path/to/file>

Supported/common file types:

• WAV (.wav)
• FLAC (.flac)
• Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) — if libsndfile built with vorbis support
• AIFF (.aiff, .aif)
• MP3 (.mp3)
• CAF (.caf)

Controls:

• Arrow keys — move menu selection
• Enter — activate selected menu item
• q — quit

• FFT size: 1024 (FFT_SIZE)
• Frames per PortAudio callback: 1024 (FPB)
• Ringbuffer capacity: 1<<16 frames
• Spectrum stored as decibels: 20 * log10(magnitude + 1e-8)
• Window: Hanning applied before FFT
• Threads: one FFT worker thread reads from ringbuffer and updates spectrum; main thread handles ncurses UI and audio stream control
• Libraries linked: PortAudio, libsndfile, FFTW (fftw3f), ncurses (menu, panel), pthreads, math