Spectrogram C++ library

It would be fairly easy to put together your own spectrogram. The steps are:

  1. window function (fairly trivial, e.g. Hanning)
  2. FFT (FFTW would be a good choice but if licensing is an issue then go for Kiss FFT or similar)
  3. calculate log magnitude of frequency domain components (trivial: log(sqrt(re * re + im * im))

you could use fftw (fftw.org) to calculate the spectrogram, you would still need to plot the data, but that should not be a problem


"How do I create a frequency vs time plot?" lists several libraries, each of which can calculate a spectrogram from a signal.

Copied and pasted from my own answer:

Some source code to generate spectrograms / waterfall plots from audio data:

  • SoX - Sound eXchange includes spectrogram source code
  • Audacity includes spectrogram source code
  • glfer includes waterfall spectrum display spectrum source code
  • source code that uses fftw to compute the spectrogram of an audio stream
  • more source code that uses OpenAL and fftw to compute the spectrogram for an audio stream
  • "Sound Activated Recorder with Spectrogram in C#" by Jeff Morton
  • Topographica seems to include spectrogram source code
  • SpectroGraph for iTunes

Image to Spectrogram goes in the reverse direction from the above utilities.