GramoFile Home Page

- Official Home Page -
Current version: 1.6(P) - Page last updated: 2001/05/23

GramoFile

Linux

Information Technology and Systems

Electrical Engineering

Delft University of Technology

Integrated sound recording and playback (with customized versions of brec(1) and bplay(1) by David Monro);
Handling of large sound files up to a few GB;
Signal peak level meter during recording;
Playback of user-specifiable parts of sound files;
Signal processing through application of `filters';
Nine filters (filter types, actually) are supplied, new ones can be added fairly easily;
Multiple filters can be used, in random order, in one single run - even multiple instances of the same filter;
Most filters can be fine-tuned through a number of parameters (independent for each filter instance);
A large sound file containing an entire side of a gramophone record can be splitted into separate sound files, one for each track;
Signal processing and track splitting are performed simultaneously; no temporary files are used at all;
Text mode user interface with a windows-like look and `feel';
Sound files of the familiar .wav type are used, to allow easy interchange with other programs;
The program comes with extensive documentation explaining the implemented filters and the track splitting.

06 Aug 05: Relocated webpage; the previous host will be shut down later this month.
03 Jun 03: GramoFile featured on linmagau.org and subsequently on Slashdot. Unfortunately, as you probably already noticed, I have absolutely no time to do any further development on this, and GramoFile-related e-mails have gone unanswered for about two years now. If you want a version that is slightly newer, check the Debian package.
23 May 01: James Tappin sent me an updated version of the CMF-3 filter. There are three patches now:
- patch 1 corrects some negative overflow checking in CMF-2;
and either
- patch 2 adds the updated CMF-3 filter to GramoFile 1.6
or
- patch 3 adds the updated CMF-3 filter to GramoFile 1.6P (the version with the Perl interface, see lower on this page). After applying this, make symlinks to signpr_cmf3.* from the perl-swig/ directory.
James also has a webpage which points to much-requested noise reduction utilities (and other interesting things).
28 Apr 01: (Mostly obsoleted by 23 May 01 entry) James Tappin surprised me with a completely (well, almost) new filter: the CMF-3 (or CMF-2-F) which still detects ticks the "old" way, but uses a new frequency-domain method to do the interpolation -- by reducing the high frequencies during the ticks. The original shape of the sound is preserved much better this way, but the processing is much slower.
The patch is available here. To compile, you need the FFTW Fourier Transform package (Debian systems: apt-get install fftw-dev). More info in the SIGNPR_CMF3.TXT contained in the patch.
James also provided some nice samples of an extreme case in .ogg format: the original, CMF-2 processed, and CMF-3 processed. Also take a look at the screenshot of these files in a wave editor, top = original, middle = CMF-3, bottom = CMF-2. The passage is a short clip from a 1938 recording of Die Zauberflöte: "(Bei Männern, welche) Liebe fühlen, fehlt auch ein gutes Herze nicht".
09 Apr 01: Everyone wanting some speedup in track splitting and signal processing should try the patch by J. Dru Lemley, which makes GramoFile use a second buffer to reduce the number of system calls during file I/O, and also has a faster way to swap samples on big-endian machines. This patch is relative to 1.6-with-all-earlier-patches, but shouldn't be too hard to apply to a "clean" 1.6.
Dru mentioned that he is successfully running GramoFile on Mac OS/X, so that's another addition to the list of "supported architectures".
27 Mar 01: People using Linux and an (on-board) sound card supported by the via82cxxx driver will notice that recording is impossible because a certain operation is not supported by that driver. Jörg Specht sent in a patch to solve this issue.
21 Feb 01: A new patch by Herbert Pophal adds a new option to the signal processing, that shortens each generated track's length to a multiple of (e.g.) 1/75th second = 588 samples = 2352 bytes, which is the "block size" on CDs. This prevents cdrecord from padding, which can be useful in certain situations.
05 Feb 01: Tom Harvey is running GramoFile on NetBSD/Alpha and found that some patches (1) are needed for that. These should also work on newer (but not older) Linux systems. He sent even more patches (2) to eliminate a few gcc warnings and improve some help texts.
01 Feb 01: Got a patch from Jon Schewe that makes file selection boxes a lot bigger, and also adds quoting to the bplay/brec commands so that file names with strange characters (like spaces or '&') get handled better. If you need/want that, get this, and if not, don't.
07 Dec 00: Bob Wilkinson ported the Perl interface to the mainstream GramoFile source tree, resulting in gramofile-1.6P.tar.gz (with the "P" of Perl). Compiling things is very easy now: just make will do what it has always done, make perl-swig will create the Perl callable interface. Read the README in the perl-swig/ subdir for more info. (You'll of course still need to have SWIG installed.)
23 Nov 00: (Mostly obsoleted by 07 Dec 00 entry) We're finally getting a bit closer to command-line usage. Bob Wilkinson has created a Perl interface to GramoFile's track splitting and signal processing routines.
It seems you have to do the following (again, I didn't try myself): Get gf.tar.gz and unzip it in an empty directory. Then copy the files listed in this file from the original gramofile-1.5 (still available here) to the newly created Gramofile/ directory. Then cd Gramofile and apply the patches using
for file in diffs/*; do temp=${file##diffs/}; patch -p1 ${temp%%.diff} < $file; done
Then use make to compile the stuff.
This interface utilises SWIG which you need to have installed. It is available pre-packaged in the major Linux distributions.
This interface allows setting the parameters of the track splitting and the sequence of filters to apply to the signal. There is no possibility to set the parameters of the individual filters; the default values will be used (which are of course easily changable in the C source).
Also included is a program wav2mp3.pl which automates the track splitting and signal processing. As input an XML file is needed with various data on the .wavs, like song titles.
22 Oct 00: Sylvain Deschenes produced a "normalize" filter.
I didn't try it myself, but it looks like this: you start with already-separated tracks (usually from different sources), possibly unprocessed. For each individual track, run "Locate tracks", this will of course detect only one track, but will also put some useful extra data in the .tracks file. With these values, you can compute the amplification you want each track to have, from -100% to +100%. Then "Process" each individual track, without splitting. Use the new "Simple Normalize Filter" as first (or only) filter, and enter the desired amplification factor in the Parameter screen. If the signal needs tick removal, have the "Conditional Median Filter II" as second filter, otherwise remove it.
The version with this extra filter is called "1.6N", but this is not an official version. For Linux/UNIX systems, get this patch; an updated DOS/Windows version is here. Note that this seems to change some defaults, so I'd suggest you keep using a 1.6-unpatched version for the "normal" work.
13 Oct 00: Thanks to Sylvain Deschenes we are proud to present a version of GramoFile that runs on DOS and Windows systems. See below under "Download" for details.
28 Mar 00: New version 1.6 with some nice enhancements, see the ChangeLog. This version incorporates all the patches I've received in the past year.
NOTE: I've not tested this release at all, I only know that it compiles for me. If there are problems, please send me patches ;-)
03 Mar 00: My account on cardit.et suddenly disappeared and won't be coming back. Moved the webpage to another machine.

GNU General Public License

GramoFile is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The GNU General Public License is also available in html format, on the GNU server.

Source code, which you can compile yourself on Linux/UNIX systems:

gramofile-1.6.tar.gz
gramofile-1.6P.tar.gz which is exactly the same as 1.6 but with the Perl interface added (see the News section above).

DOS and Windows source code and executable, produced by S. Deschenes:

gramo_w_1.6.zip

.zip

djgpp\gramofile-1.6\

C:\

.PIF

C:\djgpp\gramofile-1.6\gramofile.exe

gramofile.exe

DOSPORT.txt

.wav

CWSDPMI

Bernd Leppla

New versions will be announced on comp.os.linux.announce.

The following plaintext files are part of the tar.gz/zip file, but are available for online viewing as well:

README - Overview, installation, usage hints, and many more useful things. You should read this file completely before compiling / using the program;
Signproc.txt - In-depth description of most implemented filters, and information regarding the implementation of new filters;
Tracksplit2.txt - In-depth description of the algorithm used to locate tracks;
ChangeLog;
TODO.

The opening screen;
The main menu;
The uniform file selection screen (this particular one is of the recording function);
During recording;
During playback;
Parameters for the track splitting;
Selection of filters to be applied (signal processing).

original

processed

If you don't believe this is possible, feel free to try it yourself!

J.A.Bezemer@opensourcepartners.nl

The official GramoFile Home Page is located at http://www.opensourcepartners.nl/~costar/gramofile, for those who saved this page and did not write down its location ;-)