tico

Audio capture and terminal visualization tool that captures from a microphone and displays a time-domain graph that scrolls across your terminal.

Features

• Real-time audio capture from microphone (robust automatic device selection)
• FFT-based frequency analysis
• Customizable logging options (e.g., average sound per tick with peak detection)
• Terminal-based visualization
• Multi-compiler support (GCC, latest available Clang)
• Debug and Release build configurations

Microphone Device Selection

By default, tico automatically selects the most appropriate microphone device using robust heuristics:

• USB microphones are preferred: If a sysdefault device with a USB description is found, it is used automatically.
• Sysdefault fallback: If no USB device is found, any sysdefault device is used.
• Final fallback: If no sysdefault device is found, the standard "default" ALSA device is used.

This logic ensures that USB microphones are prioritized for best compatibility and quality, but the program will work out-of-the-box on most Linux systems with ALSA.

You can override the device selection by specifying the device name with the -d option.

Prerequisites

Before building, install the required dependencies:

apt-get install libfftw3-dev libasound2-dev cmake

• libfftw3-dev: FFTW3 library for FFT calculations
• libasound2-dev: ALSA sound library for audio capture
• cmake: Build system (3.25.0 or later)

Building

This project uses CMake with preset configurations for different compilers and build types.

Quick Start (GCC, Debug)

cmake --preset debug
cmake --build --preset debug

Available Presets

Configure Presets

Preset	Compiler	Build Type	Description
debug	GCC	Debug	Debug build with default GCC
release	GCC	Release	Release build with default GCC
debug-gcc	GCC	Debug	Explicit GCC debug build
release-gcc	GCC	Release	Explicit GCC release build
debug-clang	Clang (auto-detected latest)	Debug	Debug build with newest installed Clang
release-clang	Clang (auto-detected latest)	Release	Release build with newest installed Clang
doxygen	Clang (auto-detected latest)	Debug	Generate API documentation with Doxygen

Build Examples

# GCC builds
cmake --preset debug-gcc
cmake --build --preset debug-gcc
 
cmake --preset release-gcc
cmake --build --preset release-gcc
 
# Clang latest builds
cmake --preset debug-clang
cmake --build --preset debug-clang
 
cmake --preset release-clang
cmake --build --preset release-clang

Workflow Presets

For convenience, workflow presets combine configure → build → test steps:

# Run full workflow (configure + build + test)
cmake --workflow --preset debug
cmake --workflow --preset release
cmake --workflow --preset debug-gcc
cmake --workflow --preset release-gcc
cmake --workflow --preset debug-clang
cmake --workflow --preset release-clang
cmake --workflow --preset doxygen

Quality Workflow

Run formatting checks, clang-tidy, clang build-and-test, and a GCC build in one command:

cmake --workflow --preset quality

The quality workflow runs these steps:

• Configure (debug-clang)
• Format check (format-check)
• Static analysis (clang-tidy)
• Build (debug-clang)
• Test (debug_ctest-clang)
• GCC build (quality-gcc-build -> runs debug-gcc configure + build)
• Documentation (doxygen)

Documentation

API documentation is generated using Doxygen.

Doxygen Documentation Workflows

You can generate API documentation as part of a workflow or as a standalone step:

• Debug/Clang docs:

  cmake --workflow --preset doxygen

  Output: build/clang-debug/html/
• Release/GCC docs:

  cmake --workflow --preset release

  (Runs doxygen as the last step; output: build/release/html/)
• Release/Clang docs:

  cmake --workflow --preset release-clang

  (Runs doxygen as the last step; output: build/clang-release/html/)

You can also use the build presets directly:

• cmake --build --preset doxygen (debug/clang)
• cmake --build --preset doxygen-release (release/gcc)
• cmake --build --preset doxygen-release-clang (release/clang)

‍Note: The generated HTML documentation will be found in the html/ directory inside the build directory for the preset you use.

Testing

Run tests using CTest presets:

# Test with GCC
ctest --preset debug_ctest
ctest --preset release_ctest
 
# Test with Clang latest
ctest --preset debug_ctest-clang
ctest --preset release_ctest-clang
 
# Test with explicit GCC
ctest --preset debug_ctest-gcc
ctest --preset release_ctest-gcc

Usage

Basic Capture

./tico

With Logging Options

# Average sound of a tick per tooth with peak detection
./tico -j 15 -p peak

Development

Project Structure

• Build outputs are organized by compiler and build type:
  • build/debug/ - GCC debug build
  • build/release/ - GCC release build
  • build/gcc-debug/ - Explicit GCC debug
  • build/gcc-release/ - Explicit GCC release
  • build/clang-debug/ - Clang debug
  • build/clang-release/ - Clang release

Compiler Versions

• GCC (default system version)
• Clang (newest available version detected at configure time)

The project requires C11 standard support and exports compile commands for IDE integration.

Building from Scratch

# Clean previous builds (optional)
rm -rf build/
 
# Configure with your chosen preset
cmake --preset debug-gcc
 
# Build
cmake --build --preset debug-gcc
 
# Test
ctest --preset debug_ctest-gcc

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3).

Note: The GPLv3 license is required because this project depends on the FFTW library, which is licensed under GPL. As a result, any software linked with FFTW must also be distributed under the GPL.

See the LICENSE file for the full license text.