jmtd → log → squishyball

On Friday, I uploaded an initial package for squishyball to Debian experimental. It's now in the NEW queue.

squishyball is a command-line tool to help you compare two audio files. It supports basic A/B testing, A/B/X testing and X/X/Y ("triangle") tests to help rule out various selection, confirmation and ordering biases. I'm using it to figure out the optimal lossy audio codec and bitrate to encode my music collection with.

It can be a little fiddly to use if you also use pulseaudio. I specify a specific ALSA device via -d, identified via aplay -L, and keep alsamixer running in a separate window to adjust volume if necessary, since GNOME's volume control shortcuts effect the pulseaudio mixers only. This way I can use headphones via the onboard analog stereo output and leave my desktop session configured to use HDMI output.

For the time being, I've disabled support for the OPUS audio format. This is to prevent squishyball (GPL) from linking against libssl, which is pulled in by libopusfile. A future version of the package might manage to make this work.