Here is a command line tool to capture audio clips based on a threshold. The setup is a microphone attached to a Raspberry Pi. I used multiple microphones to test this, however, the Blue Yeti worked the best for my use case. We require the ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

The motivation for this was three main things: a tool for BPSK Receiver Implemenation, and home security purposes. The third motivation, with some major polishing up, capturing audio of animals in nature.

In the future I’d like to add a filtering stage so we can only take audio clips based on frequency or other characteristics.

Criteria to create an Audio Clip

The program is constantly recording and is waiting for the recorded audio level to be above a specified threshold. When above this threshold it starts buffering data that will be potentially saved. If the duration of the audio meets another threshold for duration and the audio level is below this threshold it will write out a file in WAVE format.

The challenge when we store the audio is we want a little audio leading up and after the clip. Currently, we store 1 second at the beginning before the audio meets the threshold, the tail end is 3 seconds.

Getting started

It’s a four step process:

1. This works only on Unix because we need alsa. You must also have a Microphone connected. I use USB microphone.
2. From alsa you’ll need to let this software know what card to use. Use arecord -l to find out.
3. Download, untar, compile and install this software
4. Capture some audio clips

Requirements

We need to have alsa installed and know what device our microphone is on.

Install Alsa

It’s likely you already have alsa. If the command arecord -l works then no need to install.

We require that alsa is installed. Then download and install.

Configure your Microphone

Here is an example for a Blue Yeti connected to my Raspberry Pi.

$ arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 1: Microphones [Blue Microphones], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

From this I will put into my ~/.asoundrc the following:

$ cat ~/.asoundrc
pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave {
    pcm "hw:1,0"
  }
}

ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 1
}

Download, Untar, Compile and Install

This project is the source and not meant to install. That is to say we could the installer tarball from this source. To install and use the project do the following:

wget http://lloydrochester.com/code/aclip-1.0.tar.gz
tar xf aclip-1.0.tar.gz
cd aclip-1.0
./configure
make
make install

The source for this repo can be found on github.

Uninstalling

You can uninstall it by going to the same directory where it was installed:

cd aclip-1.0
make uninstall

Usage

Here are the supported options once installed:

$ ./aclip --help

Usage: ./aclip [OPTIONS]

Options:
-h, --help                  Print this menu
--sampling-rate INTEGER     Sampling Rate [48000]
--num-channels INTEGER      Number of Channels [1]
--y-thresh INTEGER          Y-Axis Threshold [1000]
--x-thresh-seconds DECIMAL  X-Axis Threshold in Seconds [3.0]
--alsa-device STRING        Alsa device to connect [default]
--record                    Unconditionally Record Audio
--out-directory STRING      Directory to save files in [./]
``

I use the aforementioned `~/.asoundrc` file so I don't have set the `--alsa-device` option.

Running, without options and getting some clips looks like this:

$ ./aclip Sampling rate: 48000, Channels: 1, Frames: 24000 Trigger Audio Level: 1000 (0.02%), Minimum clip duration 3.00s recording … wrote 6 frames to file ./clip_6.50_2021-04-10-07:31:29.wav recording … wrote 8 frames to file ./clip_9.00_2021-04-10-07:31:37.wav ^C

# Output File Format

An example output file is `clip_6.50_2021-04-10-07:31:29.wav` which has the format `clip_{duration}_YYYY_MM_DD_TIME.wav`.