bend is a small command-line application for 'bending' data into audio. It used to be written in Nim and can be found here, though the Rust version here supercedes the old Nim one.

This project stems from my own use of SoX to bend raw data into audio with the command:

sox -r 44100 -b 8 -c 1 -e unsigned-integer input.raw output.wav

I wanted to write a small application that could implement this functionality but without the overhead of having to install SoX, a tool suited to performing a number of other DSP tasks that I didn't need. This was also a fun project to learn more about the structure of WAVE audio as well as experimenting with the Rust language.

Francesco Cameli is a significant contributor, particularly in optimising the code to be fast (from 100ms to less than 5ms!). I'd like to also thank him for his patience and guidance on all things Nim and Rust

To build bend yourself you need a valid rust toolchain greater than version 1.75.0. A good way to install the rust compiler is by using rustup, which can be found at the rustup website.

Once you have rustc installed (the rust compiler), you can cd to this repository and cast the following spell:

cargo install --path .

You now have the bend binary in your path which can be invoked. See the Usage section.

bend can process individual files, or process directories of files.

bend ~/posts.json ~/audio_output.wav

bend ~/Documents ~/batch_output

bend ~/Documents ~/batch_output -l 1000

bend ~/Documents ~/batch_output -l 2000 -s 16000

If you have any issues or questions please raise one on the github!