I'm looking for a way to create a audio bars visualizer similar to this in iOS.
Every white bar will move up and down depending of audio wave. I'm really lost because haven't much experience dealing with audio in Objective-c.
EDIT: What i'm seeking is what Overcast's app does on its visualizer (the group of vertical orange bars on the lower part of the podcast's image)
Anyone can help?
Thanks
EDIT: Thanks to Tomer's answer I finally made it. First I did this tutorial in order to make it all clear. Then I created my own VisualizerView for my project, you can find it in this gist. Maybe is not perfect but it does what I needed to do.
Generally, you have a few options if you want to get an idea of what something sounds like in iOS:
Use the simple AVAudioPlayer audio player, and then use the [audioPlayer averagePowerForChannel:] method to get the avarage audio level for the current moment. Check out this tutorial.
Use the Audio Queue API, which lets you send whatever audio you want to the speaker: You would read audio from your source and fill the buffers with it every time. (If you're reading from a file, use AVAssetReader) This way you always know exactly what waveform you're playing, so you can, for example, calculate its avarage power or process it in other ways like FFT. Then you'd update the bars accordingly.
EDIT: The standard way of doing such a thing is to use the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) - it extracts frequency information from a sound. Here's a good example of using it on iOS (Apple's guide here). But, of course, to use it you have to know exactly what waveform you're playing every time, so you'd probably want to use a lower-level API such as Audio Queue.
Related
I need to have a series of sound samples (audio files) being played back at the touch of a button. The audio samples need to be played back simultaneously and precisely (think 4 voices in a piece of music).
I managed to do this with several instances of AVAudioPlayer but it will go out of sync.
Reading about it, due to lack of precision it seems to not be the right choice for I'm trying to do.
Audio queue (is this part of Core Audio?) seems to be able to do what I want but I can hardly find any code bits in Swift to setup what I’m trying to do, which is:
Load the audio file, prepare it to be played, then play it (I would trigger it with an NSTimer).
Is this straightforward to implement with audio queue or should I look elsewhere?
If you could point me into the right direction I would be very grateful.
Thanks a lot!
I'm going to ask this at the risk of being too vague or asking too many things in one question, but I'm really just looking for a point in the right direction.
In my app I want to record audio, show a waveform while recording, and scroll through the waveform to record and playback from a specified time. For example, if I have 3 minutes of audio, I should be able to scroll back to 2:00 and start recording from there to fix a mistake.
In Voice Memos, this is accomplished instantaneously, without any delay or loading time. I'm trying to figure out how the did this, if anyone has a clue.
What I've tried:
EZAudio - This library is great, but doesn't do what I want. You can't scroll through the waveform. It deletes the waveform data at the beginning and begins appending it to the end once it reaches a certain length.
SCWaveformView - This waveform is nice, but it uses images. Once the waveform is too long, putting it in a scroll view causes really jittery scrolling. Also you can't build the waveform while recording, only afterward.
As far as appending, I've used this method: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11520553/1391672
But there is significant processing time, even when appending two very short clips of audio together (in my experience).
How does Voice Memos do what it does? Do you think the waveform is drawn in OpenGL or CoreGraphics? Are they using Core Audio or AVAudioRecorder? Has anyone built anything like this that can point me in the right direction?
When zoomed-in, a scrollview only needs to draw the small portion of the waveform that is visible. When zoomed-out, a graph view might only drawn every Nth point of the audio buffer, or use some other DSP down-sampling algorithm on the data before rendering. This likely has to be done using your own custom drawing or graphics rendering code inside a UIScrollView or similar custom controller. The waveform rendering code during and after recording don't have to be the same.
The recording API and the drawing API you use can be completely independent, and can be almost anything, from OpenGL to Metal to Core Graphics (on newer faster devices). On the audio end, Core Audio will help provide the lowest latency, but Audio Queues and the AVAudioEngine might also be suitable.
I'm a Unity dev and need to help out colleagues with doing this natively in Obj-C. In Unity it's no big deal :
1)samples are stored in memory as a List of float[]
2)A helper function returns float[] of n size for any given sample, at any given offset
3)Another helper function fades the data if needed
4)An AudioClip object is created with the right size to accomodate all cut samples, and is then filled at appropriate offsets.
5)The AudioClip is assigned to a player component(AudioSource).
6)AudioSource.Play(ulong offsetInSamples), plays at a sample accurate time in the future. Looping is also just a matter of setting the AudioSource object's loop parameter.
I would very much appreciate if someone could point me towards the right classes to achieve similar results in Obj-C, for iOS devices. I'm pretty sure a lot of iOS audio newbies would be intersted too. Many thanks in advance!
Gregzo
A good overview of the relevant audio APIs available in iOs is here
The highest level framework that makes sense for patching together audio clips, setting their volume levels, and playing them back in your case is probably AVFoundation.
It will involve creating AVAssets, adding them to AVPlayerItems, possibly putting them into AVMutableCompositions to merge multiple items together and adjust their volumes (audioMix), and them playing them back with AVPlayer.
AVFoundation works with AVAsset, for converting between relevant formats and lower level bytes you'll want to have a look at AudioToolbox (I can't post more than two links yet).
For an somewhat simpler API with less control have a look at AVAudioPlayer. If you need greater control (eg: games - real time / low latency) you might need to use OpenAL for playback.
I have some device which streams h264 video in following format: top half of picture is even lines of video, and bottom half of picture is odd lines of video. So the question is - how can I play this video in normal visibility, using standart players, ffplay for example.
I know about "tinterlace:merge" plugin in ffmpeg, but it combines video from two pictures following one by one. So my task is make a correct video from single frame.
Regards,
Alexey.
I recently had to deal with the exact same problem.
there are many different methods and the optimum solution completely depends on your situation,
the simplest fastest method is weaving two fields together which is perfect for immobile parts but create comb effect in moving object.
more complicated methods use motion detection methods.
what I did was merging two fields then applying Edge-Line averaging (ELA) for moving segments to reduce comb effect.
check this link for a detailed explanation of the problem
It would be good if you could provide a sample video file. You describe very well what the picture looks like, but the file may contain other information that is helpful for playback.
Furthermore, the format you describe doesn't sound like a standard format, so it's unlikely you will get a regular player to play it the way you want, out-of-the-box. If you're using ffplay, it's likely that you will have to write your own plugin to re-order the scanlines prior to displaying them.
Alternatively, you could re-encode the video into a standard format (interlaced or deinterlaced) using ffmpeg. You could then play it back in any regular player, like ffplay or VLC.
Finally, I recommend asking your question on the ffmpeg mailing list.
Suppose i have multiple frames from a video . I would like to play these frames in a movie player . These frames can change at any point of time . So it should be like a callback that should request each frame and program provides the frame to player as a response to call back.
Is it possible in IOS?
Please guide me in right direction in order to achieve this.
Thanks in advance
mia.
You are not going to be able to implement that type of approach using the built-in movie player. But, if you are just going to loop through video frames stored in PNG files in a directory, that would not be too hard to implement. You could take a look at this code as a starting point. This source code is completely free and does what you need.
PNGAnimatorDemo.zip
If you want to do some more advanced stuff, take a look at the AVImageFrameDecoder class in the AVAnimator (google it to find out more).