Stereo “tone-generator” for linux?

Question

Is there something like a stereo (separate left-and right-channel) tone-generator for Linux? Where you can set volume and tone/pitch for each channel, and preferably also set the wave-form (sine, square, sawtooth, ...) and invert one channel (as opposed to the other).

If not, any ideas for a good places to start to make one? I guess the simplest would be to adapt existing programs like synths... But if that work poorly, are there any libraries (like SDL?) that can be used as bases for such a program?

Answer 1

It sounds like you're looking for Audacity which is a cross-platform open source audio editor. One of its features is to allow you to generate tones. It's a multi-track audio editor, so you can easily create a stereo tone.

Under the Generate menu, you're able to create Sine, Sawtooth, and Square waveform tones of arbitrary frequency, amplitude, and length without the need for recording or needing additional input files.

Answer 2

You might look at speaker-test, which (on an Arch machine) I find in alsa-utils package.

speaker-test -c2 -t sine run from an xterm, gave me a 440 Hz sine wave for about 6 seconds each, alternating left and right speakers. In the xterm, it gave some information about which speaker it thought it was using.

According to the man page, it can do sine waves of arbitrary frequency and pink noise.

Answer 3

The siggen program should do the trick.

It has two channels with independent signals and a phase between them. Each channel can do these signal types:

• sine
• cosine
• square
• triangle
• sawtooth
• pulse
• noise