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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Sound in GNU Octave on Debian Lenny

I was very disappointed by the poor sound capabilities of the GNU Ocatve project compared to MATLAB. The playaudio() function was inconvenient with nasty '/dev/dsp device or resource busy' messages. This was until I installed the octave-audio package in Debian and had the powerful sound() and soundsc() functions working.

The nasty thing is that those functions didn't work out of the box. They needed to call a play command from the shell. Finally, I discovered that this command is part of the sox package on Debian. I apt-get install sox and now, sound() and soundsc() are working perfectly!

4 comments:

Multistart said...

I like your "favorite quotes" and here are some of mine:

- "Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get"

- "Theory can turn itself against you, practice never does"

- "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving" - Albert Einstein

- "For humans, honesty is a matter of degree. Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth" Scott Adams

- "It makes me nervous to fly on airplanes, since I know they are designed using floating-point arithmetic" Alston Householder (famous architect of floating-point algorithms and error analysis)

Also I want to thank you for referencing my blog (http://holoborodko.com/pavel/) on your great site. I’ve published link to your site in my links section too.

Thanks!
Pavel Holoborodko.

BioEng Student said...

Thanks dear for your nice comment... I liked your site so much as well :)

I came through your website while trying to understand the formula of a five-point first difference filter in the Pan-Tompkins QRS detection algorithm. I didn't understand where did it come from. Your page about smooth noise-robust differentiators helped me a lot. Thanks again!

I like your quotes too... I added some of them to my page, if you please!

It is really an honor for me that you added a link to my site.

I don't plan to visit Japan currently :) But maybe we can meet one day... who knows ;-)

Best,
Islam Badreldin

Maher Elnashrty said...

But i didn't work with me!!!
I found a solution in

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/octave-audio/1.1.4-2build1

you can download the audio files then put them in your workspace.
Now you can run more than audio funcitons as sound , soundsc.

Best regards,
Maher Elnashrty

Omar said...

Thanks for the tip!