Skip to main content
Csound includes a comprehensive set of command-line utilities for audio file analysis, conversion, and processing. These utilities are designed to work alongside the main Csound system and provide specialized functionality for audio signal processing tasks.

Analysis utilities

These utilities perform various types of spectral and time-domain analysis on audio files:
  • atsa - ATS (Analysis-Transformation-Synthesis) analysis for sinusoidal modeling
  • pvanal - Phase vocoder analysis for time-frequency domain processing
  • lpanal - Linear predictive coding (LPC) analysis for speech and sound modeling
  • hetro - Heterodyne filter analysis for fixed-frequency harmonic decomposition
  • cvanal - Convolution analysis for impulse response processing

File information and conversion

Utilities for examining and converting audio files:
  • sndinfo - Display detailed information about sound files
  • srconv - High-quality sample rate conversion

Audio processing

Utilities for audio manipulation and mixing:
  • mixer - Mix multiple sound files with arbitrary start times and gain curves
  • scale - Scale audio file amplitude by constant or time-varying factors

Common features

Most Csound utilities share these common characteristics:
  • Command-line interface - All utilities are invoked from the terminal
  • Standard options - Many utilities support similar flags for file I/O and format specification
  • File format support - Support for various audio formats including WAV, AIFF, and raw formats
  • Channel selection - Ability to process specific channels from multi-channel files
  • Time windowing - Options to analyze specific time segments of audio files

Getting help

Most utilities display usage information when run without arguments or with invalid options:
atsa
pvanal
lpanal
This will show available command-line options and their default values.