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Capture audio - Raspberry Pi

In this part of the lesson, you will write code to capture audio on your Raspberry Pi. Audio capture will be controlled by a button.

Hardware

The Raspberry Pi needs a button to control the audio capture.

The button you will use is a Grove button. This is a digital sensor that turns a signal on or off. These buttons can be configured to send a high signal when the button is pressed, and low when it is not, or low when pressed and high when not.

If you are using a ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT as a microphone, then there is no need to connect a button as this hat has one fitted already. Skip to the next section.

Connect the button

The button can be connected to the Grove base hat.

Task - connect the button

A grove button

  1. Insert one end of a Grove cable into the socket on the button module. It will only go in one way round.

  2. With the Raspberry Pi powered off, connect the other end of the Grove cable to the digital socket marked D5 on the Grove Base hat attached to the Pi. This socket is the second from the left, on the row of sockets next to the GPIO pins.

The grove button connected to socket D5

Capture audio

You can capture audio from the microphone using Python code.

Task - capture audio

  1. Power up the Pi and wait for it to boot

  2. Launch VS Code, either directly on the Pi, or connect via the Remote SSH extension.

  3. The PyAudio Pip package has functions to record and play back audio. This package depends on some audio libraries that need to be installed first. Run the following commands in the terminal to install these:

    sudo apt update
sudo apt install libportaudio0 libportaudio2 libportaudiocpp0 portaudio19-dev libasound2-plugins --yes

  4. Install the PyAudio Pip package.

    pip3 install pyaudio

  5. Create a new folder called smart-timer and add a file called app.py to this folder.

  6. Add the following imports to the top of this file:

    import io
import pyaudio
import time
import wave

from grove.factory import Factory

    This imports the pyaudio module, some standard Python modules to handle wave files, and the grove.factory module to import a Factory to create a button class.

  7. Below this, add code to create a Grove button.

    If you are using the ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT, use the following code:

    # The button on the ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT
button = Factory.getButton("GPIO-LOW", 17)

    This creates a button on port D17, the port that the button on the ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT is connected to. This button is set to send a low signal when pressed.

    If you are not using the ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT, and are using a Grove button connected to the base hat, use this code.

    button = Factory.getButton("GPIO-HIGH", 5)

    This creates a button on port D5 that is set to send a high signal when pressed.

  8. Below this, create an instance of the PyAudio class to handle audio:

    audio = pyaudio.PyAudio()

  9. Declare the hardware card number for the microphone and speaker. This will be the number of the card you found by running arecord -l and aplay -l earlier in this lesson.

    microphone_card_number = <microphone card number>
speaker_card_number = <speaker card number>

    Replace <microphone card number> with the number of your microphones card.

    Replace <speaker card number> with the number of your speakers card, the same number you set in the alsa.conf file.

  10. Below this, declare the sample rate to use for the audio capture and playback. You may need to change this depending on the hardware you are using.

    rate = 48000 #48KHz

    If you get sample rate errors when running this code later, change this value to 44100 or 16000. The higher the value, the better the quality of the sound.

  11. Below this, create a new function called capture_audio. This will be called to capture audio from the microphone:

    def capture_audio():

  12. Inside this function, add the following to capture the audio:

    stream = audio.open(format = pyaudio.paInt16,
                    rate = rate,
                    channels = 1, 
                    input_device_index = microphone_card_number,
                    input = True,
                    frames_per_buffer = 4096)

frames = []

while button.is_pressed():
    frames.append(stream.read(4096))

stream.stop_stream()
stream.close()

    This code opens an audio input stream using the PyAudio object. This stream will capture audio from the microphone at 16KHz, capturing it in buffers of 4096 bytes in size.

    The code then loops whilst the Grove button is pressed, reading these 4096 byte buffers into an array each time.

    💁 You can read more on the options passed to the open method in the PyAudio documentation.

    Once the button is released, the stream is stopped and closed.

  13. Add the following to the end of this function:

    wav_buffer = io.BytesIO()
with wave.open(wav_buffer, 'wb') as wavefile:
    wavefile.setnchannels(1)
    wavefile.setsampwidth(audio.get_sample_size(pyaudio.paInt16))
    wavefile.setframerate(rate)
    wavefile.writeframes(b''.join(frames))
    wav_buffer.seek(0)

return wav_buffer

    This code creates a binary buffer, and writes all the captured audio to it as a WAV file. This is a standard way to write uncompressed audio to a file. This buffer is then returned.

  14. Add the following play_audio function to play back the audio buffer:

    def play_audio(buffer):
    stream = audio.open(format = pyaudio.paInt16,
                        rate = rate,
                        channels = 1,
                        output_device_index = speaker_card_number,
                        output = True)

    with wave.open(buffer, 'rb') as wf:
        data = wf.readframes(4096)

        while len(data) > 0:
            stream.write(data)
            data = wf.readframes(4096)

        stream.close()

    This function opens another audio stream, this time for output - to play the audio. It uses the same settings as the input stream. The buffer is then opened as a wave file and written to the output stream in 4096 byte chunks, playing the audio. The stream is then closed.

  15. Add the following code below the capture_audio function to loop until the button is pressed. Once the button is pressed, the audio is captured, then played.

    while True:
    while not button.is_pressed():
        time.sleep(.1)
    
    buffer = capture_audio()
    play_audio(buffer)

  16. Run the code. Press the button and speak into the microphone. Release the button when you are done, and you will hear the recording.

    You may get some ALSA errors when the PyAudio instance is created. This is due to configuration on the Pi for audio devices you don't have. You can ignore these errors.

    pi@raspberrypi:~/smart-timer $ python3 app.py 
ALSA lib pcm.c:2565:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.front
ALSA lib pcm.c:2565:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.rear
ALSA lib pcm.c:2565:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.center_lfe
ALSA lib pcm.c:2565:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.side

    If you get the following error:

    OSError: [Errno -9997] Invalid sample rate

    then change the rate to either 44100 or 16000.

💁 You can find this code in the code-record/pi folder.

😀 Your audio recording program was a success!