This is hastily made software targeted toward an art opening in Athens, Georgia, and to be used under carefully controlled circumstances.

To play shuffled audio, specify a directory where a recursive file-tree walk will find stereo 16-bit WAV files, as in the example below.

cargo run play ~/samples-ecashin-orig/Zoom-H5

The application is designed to run until stopped with control-c.

Unsupported WAV files will result in undefined behavior. Only uncompressed 16-bit stereo WAV files are supported.

Multiple WAVs may be listed by absolute path in an exclude file specified via an option. Use -- to separate acoustic-walk arguments from cargo arguments.

cargo run -- play --exclude excluded.txt \
    ~/samples-ecashin-orig/Zoom-H5

Short grains smear tiny sounds together for an acoustic blur, while long (e.g. 3000 ms) grains allow, e.g., a whole bird call to appear in the stream.

The default is one second, 1000 ms.

cargo run -- play --exclude excluded.txt \
    --grain-ms 3000 \
    ~/samples-ecashin-orig/Zoom-H5

This application is designed to run indefinitely and lacks fully fledged shut-down mechanics by design.

It can be manually stopped by control-c or by kill.

The play subcommand offers a --use-jack option that causes acoustic-walk to use JACK for audio.

By default it uses cpal, the cross-platform audio library.

The applications sends stereo audio to the JACK audio system. There's a lot of file opening and closing, and data copying going on right now. To avoid audible buzzes from audio underruns, I am configuring JACK to use a relatively low sample rate of 44100, and a relatively large buffer size of 2048.

The sample rate of 44100 allows acoustic-walk to skip the use of samplerate::convert when the WAV files also have a 44100 sample rate. The opportunity was exposed by using flamegraph and opening the resulting SVG file in a web browser.

cargo install flamegraph
flamegraph target/debug/acoustic-walk play ~/samples-ecashin-orig/Zoom-H5

Scripts that work for me could serve as useful examples for you to build upon.

sh acouwalk.sh

The above command runs acoustic-walk in both "play" and "ring buffer" modes. It creates some files in the current working directory. To see output from the player, I trigger the ringbuf's output by creating a file named acourun.show.

I can kill the acoustic-walk processes as shown below or via sh acouwalk.sh stop.

for i in *.pid; do kill `cat "$i"`; done