Hi - I'm an academic sort and need to generate clean graphics of various audio waveforms for a "text" I'm writing for my students.

I've long kludged it (especially for "handout web pages") by taking a screenshot in Sound Forge, but this is really totally unacceptable at print resolution. I have found some other things (like Speech Filing System) that do a better job for raster, but I'm still stuck with essentially screen resolution.

Been searching forever and haven't found a program, plugin, etc. that can just import a .wav file and cough up, say, a very finely detailed EPS or other common vector file that I can tweak up in Illustrator, etc.

I'm on the Windows platform. I can do Linux if needed. A simple open source util would absolutely make my day. But I'll take any answers I can get. Many thanks in advance.

well, you could always use Matlab. I think there's a .wav import utility in matlab that provides you with an array containing all the sample values. You extract a certain length, plot the values in a graph, and export that graph to .eps.

not really a 1-step procedure, but I believe you can turn that into a script of sorts..

if you want free software, try the same approach with scilab. I'm less positive there's a wav import utility for scilab though, you might have to program your own..

http://www.neurotraces.com/scilab/scilab2/node24.html

first google hit for "scilab wav"

I've thrown together a quick command line application to read a .wav file and write an .eps file. It assumes that the input is 16-bit and it only uses the first channel in the file. The moderately ugly source and a win32 binary are available at http://www.cs.umu.se/~c03lvd/wavtoeps/wavtoeps.zip

The syntax for the tool is wavtoeps input.wav output.eps

This will create an eps file with width 100 and with a height that depends on the amplitude. The eps produced imports fine into Illustrator and Word 2003 for me so it should be relatively standard compliant. You probably don't want to run it on files longer than a few seconds. There are a lot of samples and will make the resulting path quite long and heavy.

The code is released under the "do whatever you want with it as long as I'm not held responsible" license.