PC based software (ideally shareware) to convert FFT spectra into soundfiles?

March 3, 2004 5:19 AM

Any sound artists or signal processing engineers out there know of any good PC based software (ideally shareware) to convert FFT spectra into soundfiles? I can Fourier Transform waveforms to get frequency analysis easier than I can fall off a log, but doing it the other way round is not so straightforward for me. I'd ideally like to be able to import spectra as text files (or Excel or whatever) and then output them as continuous waveforms.
posted by nylon to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Octave, a free matlab workalike will do it. It's unix native but you can either install Cygwin and then octave or there are prebuilt Windows binaries here.
posted by substrate at 5:39 AM on March 3, 2004

Response by poster: you rule, substrate. thanks.
it all looks a bit formidable at the moment, but i have stamina.
posted by nylon at 11:57 AM on March 3, 2004

I can give you a hand once you get it installed. There might be easier packages (customized just for audio). Octave is a generic mathematical environment. It can do just about anything.
posted by substrate at 2:05 PM on March 3, 2004

i'm surprised more people haven't replied to this.

i'm not an expert, but i dabbled in computer synthesis at one point, and i'm pretty sure a bunch of things will do this, but don't know about any for sure. check out things like csound, mpeg 4 / saol (kind of dead, unfortunately), clm (common lisp music), common music.
posted by andrew cooke at 2:52 PM on March 3, 2004