My little visualisation hack for OpenBSD is almost ready to be released into the wild. What's new?

For the last version I used SDL. However I observed some strange bugs: sometimes the CPU load jumped from 5% to 85% back and forth depending somehow mostly on time the app was started.

It turned out, that SDL_Flip seems to be a bottleneck and a root of trouble. A lot of googling didn't help much. It appears, that SDL misses synchronisation with X11. And there is nothing you can do about it.

So I decided to rewrite it in Xlib. And miracle happened, everything is smooth and solid now. I discovered also, that Xlib is really fun to use!

If you like to try it out, you can obtain the source code from repo. The only third-party dependency is fftw3 library.

To run this hack you'll need to start sndiod in monitoring mode:

sndiod -m play,mon,midi

And play something with any media player. Enjoy!

Update

• Download: spectrogram-2.0.tar.gz
• Source: src/spectrogram (most recent version)