spectrogram-to-album-art

A script that generates a spectrogram of each audio file in a directory, then sets the album art to the spectrogram of the associated file.

Script file leverages a custom build of sox to generate spectrogram of file with logarithmic frequency scale. Spectrogram file is set to album artwork of audio file with mid3v2. If custom build is not available, omit the '-L' option from the sox command call. This will revert sox back to a linear frequency chart which decreases resolution at lower (100-1000Hz) freqencies but still makes a useful image. this guide was helpful to determine dependencies

mid3v2 Installation

sudo apt-get install python3-mutagen

Ubuntu 20.04 Sox log Frequency Installation

Install necessary packages:
sudo apt-get install sox
sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-mp3
sudo apt-get install python3-mutagen

Build custom sox package:
sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev libao-dev libflac-dev libmp3lame-dev libtwolame-dev libltdl-dev libmad0-dev libid3tag0-dev libvorbis-dev libpng-dev libsndfile1-dev libwavpack-dev ladspa-sdk libasound2-dev libgsm1-dev libmagic-dev libpulse-dev libsamplerate0-dev debhelper-compat
mkdir sox-log-spectrogram
cd sox-log-spectrogram
download standard package source files into the build folder (dsc, tar.bz2 and tar.xz files from window on the right)
dpkg-source -x sox_14.4.2+git20190427-2.dsc
download modified spectrogram.c from joe-desbonnet-blog
replace ./sox-14.4.2.../src/spectrogram.c with spectrogram.c file from joe-desbonnet-blog
cd sox-14.4.2+git20190427

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

autoreconf -i
./configure
make
sudo make install

Usage

Make sure permissions allow for script to be ran as an executable.
Script can be called in three different ways:

1. script can be ran with no arguments passed. It will recoursively scan all of the files in the folder in which it resides.
   e.g. '/path/to/script/spectrogram_album_art.sh'
2. A directory can be passed as an argrument when running the script.
   e.g. '/path/to/script/spectrogram_album_art.sh '/path/to/files'
3. An audio file can be passed as an argument when running the script.
   e.g. '/path/to/script/spectrogram_album_art.sh '/path/to/files/file.mp3'