How to generate a sine wave with ffmpeg?

Question

I would like to generate an audio file with a sine (sinusoid) wave with FFmpeg. I know there is a sine filter but that's as far as it goes.

I tried:

fmpeg -filter "sine=48:1:5" -c:a pcms16le test

to create 5 seconds of audio at 48kHz in PCM S16LE format, but I got the following error message:

Output file #0 does not contain any stream

and the test file is empty.

You can also play a sine without creating a file with `ffplay`: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5109038/linux-sinus-audio-generator/57610684#57610684 — Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com, Aug 22 '19 at 14:03

Rajib · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-04T14:05:42.700

31

To generate a 1000 Hz signal for 5 seconds duration use this:

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "sine=frequency=1000:duration=5" test.wav

You can add -c:a pcm_s16le:

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "sine=frequency=1000:duration=5" -c:a pcm_s16le test.wav

To also set the sampling rate to 48 KHz:

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "sine=frequency=1000:sample_rate=48000:duration=5" -c:a pcm_s16le test.wav

edited Mar 04 '14 at 14:05

answered Mar 04 '14 at 13:50

Rajib

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You can also set the amplitude by adding for example: `-af "volume=-18dB"` (for -18dBFS). – mivk Dec 29 '17 at 15:16

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 16 '17 at 20:35

Apologies for necro-ing this, but in the event that someone from the future comes looking for this, if you wanted to do this in stereo, you would do the following:

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "sine=frequency=1000:duration=5" -ac 2 output.wav

You could also use -filter_complex with amerge:

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "sine=frequency=1000:duration=5" -filter_complex "[0:a][0:a]amerge=inputs=2[aout]" -map "[aout]" output.wav

How to generate a sine wave with ffmpeg?

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