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cwwav

Turns text into a Morse audio file, from the command line

What it does

Reads text and writes a sound file of it in Morse -- WAV, or anything libsndfile can write -- with speed, Farnsworth spacing, tone frequency and volume set on the command line. It reads standard input, so it sits in a pipe.

Why you would want it

ebook2cw covers the same ground with more features and MP3 output; cwwav is smaller and its output is uncompressed, which matters when the file is going into another program rather than into your ears. For generating practice material inside a script, or producing a known-good Morse signal to test a decoder against, this is the simpler tool.

Before it will work

None to generate a file. Something to play it with.

How it installs

  • git (make) — https://github.com/oyvholm/cwwav at 0.4.1
  • build dependencies: build-essential, libsndfile1-dev
  • compiler flags: -Wno-implicit-function-declaration — without these it does not build on a current toolchain
  • the project's build system has no install rule; the binaries listed below are copied into the prefix instead
  • Built from tag 0.4.1 in a Debian 13 container on 2026-08-28: make exits 0 with the flag above, produces cwwav, and ./cwwav --help prints its usage. Upstream is dormant -- the head of master is 9618fd29adab, dated 2018-06-06, read from the branch rather than from GitHub's updated_at (D-032). Dormant is not dead: the program does one thing and is finished.

Binaries this produces:

  • cwwav

Known problems

It needs a compiler flag to build at all on a current toolchain, which is recorded in the install block above rather than discovered by you. Upstream has not moved since 2018, so that flag will keep being needed. It writes files and does not play them, which surprises people expecting a sounder -- cw from unixcw is that.

Keeping it current

  • probe: github tags (oyvholm/cwwav)
  • strategy: rebuild
  • No release since 0.4.1 and no commit since 2018. Check annually rather than expecting movement.

Where to get help with the software itself

Oyvind A. Holm. GitHub issues at the URL above, on a dormant repository.

Source: catalog/packages/cwwav.yaml