Notes of a Programmer: Audio Playing and Recording with Octave

Friday, September 19, 2014

Audio Playing and Recording with Octave

Octave Forge has an audio package. At present, the package is in the "unmaintained" status. However, once installed successfully, it has all the functionality that I need:

Record audio data
Play audio data

I primarily use it on Linux virtual machines on Windows hosts. The following procedure was tested with Octave 3.6 on a Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy) guest operating system on a Windows 8.1 host.

It is quite straight forward to install the audio package,

Install Octave and Octave development package.
```
 
```
```
sudo apt-get install octave liboctave-dev
```
The latter is required to install Octave packages from Octave Forge.
Install the audio package from Octave Forge.
```
     sudo octave
     
```
In Octave, run
```
     pkg install -forge audio
     
```
We may list installed packages in Octave to verify that it is successfully installed by
```
     pkg list
     
```
The output should look like the following,
```
     Package Name  | Version | Installation directory
     --------------+---------+-----------------------
            audio *|   1.1.4 | /usr/share/octave/packages/audio-1.1.4
     
```
which shows that the audio package is version 1.1.4 and installed at /usr/share/octave/packages/audio-1.1.4. The "*" next to the package name indicates that the package is loaded and ready to use.

If you run Octave as a non-root user, the Octave package will be installed under the user's home directory and can only be used by the user. By running Octave as root (i.e., using sudo octave), we install the Octave package for everyone.
The audio package uses some external programs to play and record audio data. Sox is sufficient for playing sound. We now install Sox in Linux.
```
     apt-get install sox
     
```
The audio package uses OSS to record audio data. Ubuntu 13.10 does not have an OSS package. Instead, it provides an ALSA wrapper for OSS. We now install the wrapper.
```
    apt-get install alsa-oss
    
```
To use the ALSA wrapper for OSS, we must invoke the aoss command. Then to run Octave, we run,
```
    aoss octave
    
```
Without using aoss to invoke octave, you would encounter an error indicating that it failed to open /dev/dsp that is supposedly created by OSS. Since we are emulating OSS using ALSA, the system does not have the device file.
Now, let us play a tone of 2 seconds at 400 Hz in Octave.
```
  y = cos(2 * pi * 400 * (0:1/44100:2));
  sound(6, 44100);
  
```
Note that the sampling rate is 44100Hz in the above.

To record and then play the recorded audio data, we may do


  [y, fs, ch] = aurecord(5, 44100, 2);
  sound(y, fs, ch);

Finally, if you do not hear anything when you play the sound, check your virtual machine setting. It must have an appropriate audio card. The following shows the audio card setting for the Ubuntu virtual machine running in VMware Player.

At the same time, the mixer of the Windows host should show that the virtual machine is a source as shown below. You can open the mixer by right-cliking on the "speaker" icon in the system tray, then choose "Open Volume Mixer".

If you are running VirtualBox, you will have more than one audio driver to choose from when configuring the virtual machine. My experience is that not all driver works on a particular host. You can test the driver one by one until you find one that works. When the driver works and the virtual machine is running, you should observe that Windows Mixer shows the virtual machine as a sound source similar to the figure above.