Musualiser is an imgui application designed to both play audio files and capture application audio to render their waveforms in real time. This project was undertaken as an educational excercise, it was pivotal in expanding my understanding of cross-threaded Rust applications, particularly with the use of mutexes, channels, condvars, and Arc. Musualiser creates the visualisation by performing an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) on the audio using the RustFFT crate, it then interpolates these results using splines from the splines crate, and renders them using Bezier curves with imgui-rs. In the process of creating this project I realised no libraries existed for capturing audio from only one application on Windows and that to achieve this people had to interact directly with the Windows API using the windows-rs crate. Thus I contributed to the wasapi-rs crate to expand that functionality as is detailed here.
Musualiser can be used with audio files on disk by leveraging rodio, the user simply has to select a file in a dialogue and Musualiser will start playing the audio file through the active audio device and display the waveform. Musualiser can also be used to capture any audio producing process and render its waveform, wasapi-rs is used to capture the audio and a combination of sysinfo and windows-rs are used to keep track of currently producing audio processes.
- Cross-threaded Rust Applications: Develop a strong understanding of using mutexes, channels, condvars, and Arc for safe concurrency in Rust.
- FFT and Visualization: Learn how to visualize the frequency spectrum of audio, using FFTs and splines and Bezier curves to smooth visualisation.
- Audio Processing: Gain insights into audio rendering and capturing techniques.
- WASAPI Implementation: Understand and contribute to the WASAPI project, specifically implementing application-specific audio loopback.
- Windows Interaction: Use of the windows API with the windows-rs crate to gather information about and update audio producing apps.
Musualiser leverages the following libraries:
- imgui-rs for the GUI.
- glow for rendering.
- winit for window management.
- rodio for file audio playback.
- WASAPI for recording audio from applications.
- windows-rs for interacting with the Windows API to be notified of audio producing processes.
- sysinfo for gathering information about processes.
- RustFFT for performing fast fourier transforms.
- splines for spline interpolation.
Run the application using cargo. Note that Musualiser can only run on Windows.
cargo run --releaseEnsure your system has OpenGL installed to avoid any rendering issues.
Capturing the audio from Spotify.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
This project represents a personal educational journey into further into Rust as well app design as multiple complex components had to be linked together, pushing the boundaries of my knowledge and skills.