The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk or Python. Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, e.g. sound card and disk I/O. Snack also has primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals.

The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.

Highlights

• Support for in-memory sound objects, file based audio, and streaming audio.
• Multiple simultaneous playback and recording threads (system dependent).
• All audio data handled as floating point internally for fast and accurate computations.
• Multi-platform, same scripts usable on Windows 95/98/NT/2000, Linux, Macintosh, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and SGI IRIX.
• Script compilation tool included, for easy deployment using stand-alone executables.
• Filters which can be used to process sound objects or during playback for on-the-fly operation.
• Visualization with waveforms, spectrograms, and spectrum sections. Also, postscript support.
• Real-time visualization/spectrum analysis.
• Web enabled, possible to run scripts embedded in web pages through the use of the Tcl plug-in.
• Extensible, new commands, filters, and sound file formats can be added using the Snack C-library.
• Lots of examples included as well as a skeleton C-extension.
• Supported sound file formats: WAV, AU, AIFF, MP3, CSL, SD, SMP, and NIST/Sphere

Supported platforms

• Macintosh (PowerPC)
• Windows (95, 98, NT4, 2000)
• Linux

• Installation instructions (with Tcl/Tk)
• Installation instructions (with Python)
• Introductory examples and FAQ
• Snack manual for Tcl/Tk and Python
• Macintosh with Tcl/Tk 8.3.3 [ self-extracting binary ]
• Directory of Windows versions
• Directory of Linux versions
• Source release for all platforms (requires Tcl/Tk [ tar.gz ]