weird audio visualizer for ALSA(soon)

wava is a commandline audio visualizer for Pulseaudio and ALSA that is heavily inspired by cava. however, instead of visualizing audio with bars like cava and many other visualizers, wava focuses on creating aesthetic scenes by using colors and shapes that react to characteristics of the sounds being played like pitch and amplitude.

WARNING: wava can produce a lot of flashing lights and colors that may be unsuitable for individuals with epilepsy.

for Arch systems, there is an AUR available here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wava-git

to build from source, wava requires FFTW, libconfig, and Pulseaudio/ALSA dev files.

to install all required dependenecies on Debian/Ubuntu systems, simply run

sudo apt-get install -y libpulse-dev libasound2-dev libfftw3-dev libconfig++-dev

in your terminal.

i am not familiar with installing dependencies on other systems, but i believe these commands should work:

Fedora

dnf install alsa-lib-devel fftw3-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel libconfig-devel libtool

openSUSE

zypper install alsa-devel fftw3-devel libpulse-devel libtool libconfig-devel

after dependencies are installed, run

mkdir -p ~/.config/wava 
cp -p ./config/wava.cfg ~/.config/wava/
make
sudo make install

in the cloned repo to install wava.

to uninstall, run

rm -rf ~/.config/wava
sudo make uninstall

in the cloned repo.

by default, wava is installed to /usr/local/bin/. if you would like to change that, run

make install PREFIX=<desired dir>

and make sure to use the same prefix for make uninstall.

upon starting wava, you will be greeted with a black screen because nothing is rendered by default. in this state, only the background will respond to audio being played. briefly play something and verify the background changes color to make sure a connection was properly established to the audio server.

out of the box, the way the background responds to audio may require some tweaking to match your preference. to that end, wava supports keybinds for decreasing/increasing the noise gate (c/v), decreasing/increasing brightness (b/n), and decreasing/increasing the decay rate (j/k).

generally speaking, if the background is not responding to sounds, you want to decrease the noise gate. if the colors are too bright and immediately forming white, decrease the brightness. if the colors are changing too quickly, decrease the decay rate (and vice versa).

if the window is too small or big, you can also change its size with the arrow keys.

now that the background is configured to your liking, you can start adding shapes. to add a shape, press 1, 2, or 3 on your keyboard to generate a donut, a sphere, and a cube respectively. additionally, to increase real-time audio responsiveness, wava renders shapes with reduced detail by default. to increase/decrease detail along the x-axis for spheres and donuts, press q/a. to increase/detail along the y-axis, press w/s. to increase/detail for cubes, press e/d.

wava has a range of color palettes that can be assigned to the background and individual shapes. to change the background color palette, press z/x. the name of the palette should appear under the rendering window. in order to change the palette of individual shapes, you must change to highlight mode.

wava has two modes to make better use of the keyboard. the first is normal mode in which you can generate new shapes and how they are rendered, change background colors, change audio responsiveness settings, and read from/write to a config file. the second mode is "highlight" mode, in which you can select individual shapes and change their characteristics like color, size, and position on the screen. in order to change to highlight mode, have at least one shape on screen and press H. if it changed successfully, you should see "HIGHLIGHT MODE" under the render window.

now one of the shapes on screen should be a different color—this means that it is selected and you can change its individual characteristics. to change its palette, press z/x like you did to change the background palette. again, the name of the palette should appear below the rendering window. you can also increase or decrease its size by pressing the up arrow and down arrow keys respectively, and you can change its position with the w, a, s, and d keys.

to change which shape is being selected, press the left or right arrow keys. to delete the selected shape, press D.

after you've made the desired changes to your shapes, you can press N to change back to normal mode.

if you really enjoy the scene you've made, you can save to the config file with W. if you would like to reload to your previously saved scene, press R.

once you're done using wava, press ESC to exit (exiting forcefully is not recommended because it can require a restart of the pulseaudio server).

that is pretty much all you need to know to use wava. the next section has an entire list of the keybinds

normal AND highlight mode:

m - enable/disable response to audio

ESC - quit wava

h - turn on/off description below window

normal mode:

W - write to config

R - read from config

1 - add donut

2 - add sphere

3 - add cube

arrow keys - change size of window

c/v - decrease/increase noise gate

b/n - decrease/increase brightness

j/k - decrease/increase decay rate

z/x - change background palette

a/q - decrease/increase phi detail (affects spheres and donuts)

w/s - decrease/increase theta detail (affects spheres and donuts)

e/d - decrease/increase prism detail (affects cubes)

f/r - decrease/increase light smoothness

H - change to highlight mode

highlight mode:

UP_ARROW/DOWN_ARROW - decrease/increase size of selected shape

LEFT_ARROW/RIGHT_ARROW - change which shape is selected

z/x - change palette of selected shape

w/a/s/d - change position of selected shape

D - delete selected shape

N - change back to normal mode

credit to:

https://github.com/ShakaUVM/colors for helpful ncurses alternative

https://github.com/Dugy/quick_arg_parser for easy-to-use arg parser