18 Aug
2004
18 Aug
'04
7:13 a.m.
michael tewner wrote:
For my college final project, I'm embarking on a
very similar idea. My
project advisor has me implementing a wavelet transform in python, and
displaying a waterfall in tcl/tk. GRanted, I've never programmed in either
language; I'm not even sure either of those are efficient enough to
handle it in real time!
I don't have much experience with python, but to open a wavfile, you can
use snack:
http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/
"The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting
language such as Tcl/Tk <http://tcl.activestate.com/> or Python
<http://www.python.org/>. Using Snack you can create powerful
multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack
has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file
and socket I/O."
One thing which annoyed me when using snack is that whenever you are
using it, you need to open an audio device, even if you just want to
read a wavfile. On computers with soundcard which don't support hardware
mxing, it is very annoying.
A great thing would be to wrap libsndfile to python, but I don't know
anything about implementing C extension in Python, so I don't really
know how easy it is. Maybe Erik, the creator of libsndfile, have better
advice to give ;)
Computing simple wavelet tranforms (1d, dyadic wavelet) is trivial even
in C, it should be pretty straightforward to implement it with Python.
There is the numarray extension, which enables to compute with arrays in
a efficient way, a la matlab. In fact, I looked at python a few months
ago to see if it could replace matlab as a scientific environment,
projects like scipy are promising (http://www.scipy.org/). But right
now, python is moving from numeric ( a former fast vector implementation
for python) to numarray, which creates a lof of incompatibilities
between different python libraries, and made me stay away from switching
from matlab to Python, at least for now.
Concerning fft, it should be easy to wrap fftw, for example. See for
example this link : http://pylab.sourceforge.net/
Right now, *I* have the feeling that the biggest problem of python for
numeric computation is the lack of standardization, but it will
hopefully change soon(I can't imagine how wonderful it would be to run
IronPython with scientific extensions into mono :) ).
David