SoundMeter is a command-line tool to obtain sound power in real time. It basically turns the audio recording functionality into a sound meter for machines that ship with audio input devices (e.g. microphone). It currently reveals the root-mean-square (RMS) of sound fragments, which is a measure of the power in an audio signal. The actual values also depend on the system settings of sound input.

• A command-line meter that supports triggering upon events
• Monitor API for backend module programming

On Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev python-dev alsa-utils

On Fedora/RHEL:

$ sudo yum install portaudio-devel python-devel alsa-utils

On OS X:

$ brew install portaudio

• argparse
• pyaudio
• pydub
• python-daemon

You can install the package with pip using the following command to allow externally hosted packages:

$ pip install soundmeter --allow-all-external --allow-unverified pyaudio

Or, you can download a source distribution and install with these commands:

$ python setup.py install

The simplest usage is to run "soundmeter" from command-line without any options:

$ soundmeter

Collect RMS values for 10 seconds so that you will know the sound level in the current environment:

$ soundmeter --collect --seconds 10
Collecting RMS values...
   154  Timeout
Collected result:
    min:        152
    max:        211
    avg:        156

You can set trigger and action for soundmeter.

Stop the soundmeter if RMS is greater than 211 consecutively for 3 times:

$ soundmeter --trigger +211 3 --action stop

Execute trigger.sh if RMS is greater than 211:

$ soundmeter --trigger +211 --action exec --exec trigger.sh

Execute trigger.sh and stop soundmeter if RMS is less than 152 consecutively for 3 times:

$ soundmeter --trigger -152 3 --action exec-stop --exec trigger.sh

Run the soundmeter with trigger and action in the background:

$ soundmeter --trigger +211 3 --action exec --exec trigger.sh --daemonize

Run the soundmeter for 2 minutes and log to meter.log:

$ soundmeter --seconds 120 --log meter.log

The "soundmeter" command accepts the following options:

-c, --collect collect RMS values to determine thresholds -s SECS, --seconds SECS time in seconds to run the meter (default forever) -a ACTION_TYPE, --action ACTION_TYPE triggered action (stop, exec-stop and exec) -t THRESHOLD, --trigger THRESHOLD trigger condition (threshold RMS and an optional number of consecutive triggering times, which defaults 1) -e FILE, --execute FILE shell script to execute upon trigger (defaults to ~/.soundmeter/trigger.sh) -d, --daemonize run the meter in the background --log LOGFILE log the meter (defaults to ~/.soundmeter/log) -v, --verbose verbose mode --segment SECONDS audio segment length recorded in seconds (defaults to 0.5); when specified, it overrides audio_segment_length in ~/.soundmeter/config

Some "dependency-required" parameters can be configured at ~/.soundmeter/config. The default configuration is:

[soundmeter]
frames_per_buffer = 2048
format = 8
channels = 2
rate = 44100
audio_segment_length = 0.5