How do I compile sndpeek on the latest ubuntu?

Compiling sndpeek (and one of its dependencies) is possible on Ubuntu 12.04, but slightly tricky, so bear with me for this longish tutorial. The mailing lists on the site are useful when you run into problems.

Firstly, there are several dependencies that need to be installed. One is mentioned on the Princeton site and is libsndfile; this needs to be compiled from source itself. Download the source from the site and verify the downloaded file with the gpg signature(see elsewhere on this site for how to do that).

Now it is a simple case of moving to the downloaded folder and running:

./configure
make
sudo make install or sudo checkinstall

However, I have found that other dependencies are necessary for a successful compile; some of which are mentioned in this article. I have added the others that are necessary to this command:

sudo apt-get install libxmu-dev libxi-dev libglui-dev freeglut3-dev libglui2c2 libasound2-dev

Now download sndpeek from the site, unpack it and cd to the folder, then cd to the src folder, which contains a marsyas and a sndpeek folder. As per the useful article here , you need to add #include <cstdlib> to marsyas/LPC.cpp and #include <cstdio> to sndpeek/RTAudio.cpp. Please place these additions near the other #include instructions at the tops of the files. I found that I did not have to run in terminal export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig, which the readme advocated, so it should not be necessary.

If you have been following these instructions, you should already be in the src folder, so now move to the sndpeek folder within that folder and run make: there will be a choice, as you know, but I would choose alsa.

make linux-alsa
sudo make install or sudo checkinstall

Now enter sndpeek in the terminal to launch it, speak into your microphone to give it some input and you will get a waveform as in the screenshot below.

After you have launched the program, a list of options appears in the terminal, so you can experiment with it as you like: you can, for example, alter the size and nature of the waveform and other effects. There is also the same list of sndpeek options on the official site, which you can print off for reference. You can, for example, play some music with sndpeek (although this was tested with an ogg file, and it will not play all formats):

sndpeek /location/of/track