Monitoring the microphone level with a command line tool in Linux

Question

I am looking for a tool that will tell me, in less than half a second, if the microphone is picking up any sound above a certain threshold. (I plan to then mute the Master channel with another command line tool, like amixer.)

Answer 1

This solution will avoid writing repeatedly to disk, and even though it in worst case takes a second instead of the desired less than half a second, I found it to be fast enough after trying it. So, here are the two scripts I use:

./detect:

while true; do
    arecord -d 1 /dev/shm/tmp_rec.wav ; sox -t .wav /dev/shm/tmp_rec.wav -n stat 2>\
    &1 | grep "Maximum amplitude" | cut -d ':' -f 2 | ./check.py
    if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
         amixer set Master 0
    else
         amixer set Master 80
    fi
done

./check.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

number = 0.0
thing="NO"

line = sys.stdin.readline()
thing = line.strip()
number = float(thing)

if number < 0.15:
    raise Exception,"Below threshold"

Hardly elegant, but it works.

Note: If you want a more gradual thing, add something like this:

   for i in `seq 0 80 | tac`; do
      amixer set Master $i
   done

for muting and

   for i in `seq 0 80`; do
      amixer set Master $i
   done

for unmuting.