{
  "id": 17570498,
  "title": "AudioLens: listen to audio and inspect waveforms and spectrograms in VS Code",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/01/audiolens-listen-to-audio-and-inspect-waveforms-and-spectrograms-in",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-01T09:21:50.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/simzhou261/audiolens-listen-to-audio-and-inspect-waveforms-and-spectrograms-in-vs-code-3dfa"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "AudioLens is a free, open-source VS Code extension that allows developers to listen to audio, inspect waveforms, and analyze spectrograms directly within the code editor. To use the extension, open an audio file alongside your code, transcript, manifest, or model output. Then, select a region of the audio to listen to and inspect it more closely.\n\nPressing the Spacebar plays or pauses the audio, while dragging a selection on the timeline allows you to play a specific region. For multi-channel recordings, each channel is displayed as its own track, with per-channel gain, pan, mute, and solo controls. This makes it easy to isolate and focus on specific channels if the audio sounds wrong for only one of them.\n\nEach channel can display either a waveform, a spectrogram, or both, with a shared timeline. Users can zoom in on transients, compare channels, and follow tonal components across time while listening. The spectrogram uses short-time Fourier transform (STFT) analysis and allows users to adjust parameters such as FFT size, window function, frequency scale, displayed frequency range, and color palette. Available frequency scales include linear, logarithmic, Mel, Bark, and ERB.\n\nIn addition to waveform and spectrogram views, AudioLens presents numerical measurements for the active channel, including RMS, sample peak, clipping ratio, dominant frequency, and spectral centroid. These values offer quantitative context to complement what the user sees and hears. AudioLens also supports various workflows in speech and audio development, such as remote SSH preview and inspection, explicit specification of raw PCM parameters, and opening audio paths from manifest or log files.\n\nAudioLens can be installed from the VS Code Marketplace or via the command `code --install-extension simzhou.audiolens`. After installation, users can open an audio file in the extension. If VS Code chooses a different viewer, users can reopen the editor with AudioLens using the \"Reopen Editor With…\" option.\n\nTo get started, try selecting a short region of audio, listening to it, and switching between waveform and spectrogram views. The companion Gist provides a reproducible example using Python's standard library to generate deliberate audio problems like silent channel intervals, hard clipping, and sample-rate mismatches. The source code, documentation, and more GIF demos are available on GitHub. Feedback on playback, spectrogram controls, multi-channel inspection, or remote file handling is welcome, and reproducible problems can be reported on the project's GitHub issues page.",
  "summary": "AudioLens lets you listen to audio, inspect waveforms, and analyze spectrograms directly in VS Code . Open a recording beside the code, transcript, manifest, or model output you are working on, then select a region to hear and inspect it more closely. I maintain AudioLens, a free, open-source extension under Apache-2.0. The extension was developed primarily with AI-generated code, and this post…",
  "key_points": [
    "AudioLens is VS Code extension for audio analysis",
    "Listen to audio, inspect waveforms, spectrograms",
    "Supports waveform, spectrogram, RMS, peak, clipping ratio"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}