WHAT IS AUDIOLOG

Audiolog is a little tool for analysing traces or logfiles in realtime and producing sound events. It always read line by line from standard input. In a configuration file you configure regular expressions. If audiolog reads a line matching a certain expression, it plays a note. You can specify the pitch and duration of that note. Also you can specify a .wav-file, but there are still some bugs in the .wav-output code, so don't wonder, if it sounds a bit strange...

What is special about audiolog and why not use logsurfer in combination with wavplay? Here is the answer: Audiolog is specialized for realtime events:

Multiple events are recognized at the same time. Multiple sound can be played in parallel.
The latency is very short. Its able to distinguish events occuring at rates of 20 per second and even more.

USAGE

If you call audiolog without parameters, it tries to open /etc/audiolog.conf, which is normally not existant. Better write a small configuration file and specify it with -c FILE. Then use tcpdump or another tracer to produce the output to be scanned. Example:

tcpdump -nl | audiolog -c /usr/share/audiolog/ping.al

AUDIOLOG WRAPPER

The most conveniant way to use audiolog is via the audiolog wrapper "alw". Just type "alw". It will output a list of predifined configurations. Pick one and call alw with the configuration mode as argument, for example:

linux:~ # alw net

Audiolog automatically calls tcpdump and uses /usr/share/audiolog/net.al as configurtation file. You will be able to hear your network traffic :-)!

CONFIGURATION FILE SYNTAX

Please look into /usr/share/audiolog for examples.

Text between '#' and end of line is ignored. Empty lines are ignored, too.

Each line contains a command to be followed by parameters. Quotes and backslashes how no special meaning. All characters are taken literally, with the exception of:

leading spaces
trailling spaces
the linefeed at the end of the line

which will be ignored.

Example

# ====================================================================== match echo request
play sine 1000 0.10

match echo reply
play sine 2000 0.10
# ======================================================================

Each command begins with a keyword, which may have parameters.

COMMANDS

match

        Specifies an extended regular expression lines need to
        match. No quotes
        are needed nor supported. All spaces between match
        and the first non-space character are ignored and
        not accounted for the expression. Other spaces are
        taken literally. So the following two lines match
        different loglines:

        match echo request
        match echo  request

exclude

        Specifies an extended regular expression that the
        line must not match.

continue

        Normally the rule processing is aborted after the
        first match. If you set continue (before the play
        command ending the rule!) then the processing is
        continued, so that more than one rule may match
        and play a sound.

play

        Plays a sound, if the line matches the previous expression
        specified with match and does not match the expression
        specified with exclude. After that a new rule definition
        starts.

        The first parameter is the sound type.
        currently supported is only "sine". After sine are
        two numbers: the pitch in Hz and the duration in seconds.
        Expample:

        play sine 440 0.5 # play sine note pitch 440 Hz duration 0.5 seconds

        Important to know: The playing of the note does not delay
        the further processing!

audiolog and alw are aborted by CTRL-C or kill. That's all. So have a lot of fun with the thing.

Mathias Kettner
audiolog@mathias-kettner.de
http://mathias-kettner.de/audiolog.html