What's New

• Winamp-style peak physics with gravity-based decay and peak hold
• Hann windowing + perceptual frequency weighting for cleaner bass/treble balance
• Recalibrated AGC and noise floor for accurate movement at any volume
• 95% window overlap in signal processor for sharper transient response
• Oscilloscope mode (M) now works across all themes
• Eliminated screen flicker on theme transitions
• Refactored to strict C++17 for full MinGW/MSVC parity
• JSON theme parser + tokenization (thanks to @Joe.r - see #19)
• Documentation fixes (thanks to @Yug - #20)

New Themes

• Gradient (Green → Red fade)
• Pink (minimalist solid block)

Documentation

See THEMES.md to build your own themes.

Full Changes

See PR #19 for the complete technical breakdown.

Download

Grab the lone spectrum.exe from the assets and run - no compiler required. :)
For theme customization, grab spectrum.zip instead.

v1.1.0 — spectrum

What's New

• Renamed from terminal-equalizer to spectrum
• Static linking: the .exe now runs on machines without a compiler or FFTW installed
• Compiler agnosticism: now builds with MinGW, MSVC, and Clang via smart CMake configuration
• Added colour support (thanks to @Joe.r)
• Cleaned up duplicate #includes and added contributing guidelines

Full Changes

See PR #18 for the complete technical breakdown.

Download

Grab spectrum.exe from the assets below, no compiler required. :)

Terminal Equalizer v1.0.0

This is the first stable release of Terminal Equalizer, command line audio visualizer written in C++17. It intercepts your computers audio to provide a mathematically accurate frequency spectrum directly in your standard Windows console.

Key Features

• Zero-Flicker ANSI Rendering: Uses VT100 escape codes to overwrite the console framebuffer rather than clearing it, enabling a buttery-smooth, tear-free visual experience.
• True Logarithmic Scaling: Implements decibel (dB) normalization with an adjustable noise floor to ensure the visualizer's response matches human hearing perception.
• Dynamic UI Scaling: Real-time frequency binning and resolution adjustments that automatically adapt to your terminal's window dimensions.
• High-Concurrency Engine: Features a decoupled Producer-Consumer threading model to separate low-latency audio capture from compute-intensive DSP rendering.
• Data Integrity: Built-in "data scrubbing" to filter out driver-level anomalies like NaN, Inf, and buffer overflows before they reach the visualizer.

Under the Hood

• Language: C++17 (compiled with GCC 15.2.0 / MinGW-w64).
• Audio Pipeline: Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI) in Loopback mode.
• DSP Engine: Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) powered by the industrial-grade FFTW3 library.
• Threading: Lock-guarded std::mutex shared memory state for thread-safe buffer exchange.

Installation & Usage

This release is pre-compiled for Windows x64.

1. Download Terminal-Equalizer-v1.0.0.zip from the Assets below.
2. Extract the contents to a folder of your choice.
3. Important: Ensure libfftw3-3.dll remains in the same directory as terminal-equalizer.exe.
4. Launch the executable and play any audio on your system.

Known Limitations

• OS Support: Currently supports Windows only due to the WASAPI dependency.