Visualizer2 Manual
Visualizer2 Manual
Visualizer2 Manual
Visualizer
Operation Manual
Introduction 3
Interface Overview 4
Level Meter 7
Spectrum Analysers 9
Spectrograms 11
Vectorscope 13
Lissajous 13
Polar 14
Correlation by Frequency 15
Correlation Meter 17
Comparison Mode 19
Reporting a Problem 21
Version History 22
The manual is divided in to several sections, as listed on the contents page (2).
The overview section is intended to give the new user a broad run-through generic
operations such as selecting different views, opening control panels, etc. This section
is recommended reading for anyone new to the software, introducing concepts and
highlighting themes that run through the interface, improving workflow and intuitive
operation.
An introduction to FFT analysis is also provided for those who are interested in
understanding how digital audio analysis works within Visualizer. The strengths and
weaknesses of this approach are discussed, which will allow the more advanced user
to make informed decisions, particularly with respect to the Set-up options, which
allow the user to adjust several of the underlying algorithmic parameters.
The Visualizer interface is divided into three main sections. The graphical view
display area [1], the view selector controls [2] and the control panel [3]. The top edge
of the interface also contains several generic functions described below [4, 5 & 6].
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1 Graphical View Display Area. This is where the results of the audio analysis
are displayed.
This area is treated as ‘soft space’ and can be configured to show a variety of
different views. This is a distinct advantage over many audio analysis tools,
which often require the user to select another interface module in order to
change the display, or even prohibit certain view combinations entirely.
2 View Selectors. This column of controls selects the various views available
for display. Clicking a control ‘on’ will cause the corresponding view to appear
in the graphical display area [1], clicking an active control will remove that view
from the display. The icons on the controls depict the view in question as
shown below.
Level Meter
Spectrum Analyser
Spectrogram
Stereo Spectrogram
Vectorscope
Correlation by Frequency
Correlation Meter
Most of the views also have a view solo control. This control
can be used to fill the graphics display area [1] entirely with
the chosen view to allow an instant detailed inspection of the
chosen view. This control operates as an exclusive solo, and
is available even when a view is not currently displayed.
3 Edit Control Panel. The Edit Control Panel is where the various controls for
adjusting the different displays are shown and is accessed via the edit
selectors [2]. What is shown here will depend upon the active edit selector.
The panel can be hidden from view so as to maximise the available view
space by clicking the active edit selector.
4 Link control. The link control is a handy feature designed to allow rapid
changes to be made to multiple displays simultaneously. Simply put, when
‘Link’ is selected, the interface automatically updates ‘equivalent parameters’
for all views, including the one being adjusted on screen. E.g. If the link is
selected and a view is magnified using the zoom feature, all other views with a
like scale will also be magnified in the same way. If ‘Link’ is not selected, then
only the individual control being adjusted will be affected. Another example
would be using the link control to turn on/off all the peak hold views at once.
5 Clear. The clear button can be used to reset current views, removing peak
hold envelopes. This can be useful when a specific section of audio is being
inspected in a larger piece.
9 Plugin Title. Click in this area to open the credits and licensing screen.
Zoom and Scroll. Several views within Visualizer are scaled (either in dB or against
frequency – or both). These views can be adjusted to show ranges in greater detail
by zooming and/or scrolling the scales. This is achieved by moving the mouse over
the scale in question and dragging along the line of the scale to scroll, and dragging
in a perpendicular direction to zoom in/out. To reset the scale to the full range hold
down control (Ctrl) and click the scale.
Default values. Holding down control (Ctrl) and clicking a control will return the
control to the default position.
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The level meter view is turned on using the level meter View Selector control [1]. The
adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control Panel [3] which is accessed
via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
The level meter offers several pre-set scales and is also fully customisable to suit
individual requirements using the following controls.
NB: To adjust both primary and secondary meters together [4], activate the ’link’
control. If you wish to adjust the meters independently, ensure ‘link’ is not active. The
parameters will then only affect the ‘primary meter’.
4 Level Meter Display. Shows the level meter bars, as configured by the
controls below. The centre two bars are the ‘inner’ primary meter the ‘outer’
bars secondary meter, when this is active.
5 Meter Orientation. Toggles horizontal mode on and off. The meter will
automatically resize and position itself to make the best use of the screen
space available.
6 Pre-set selector. Clicking in this area will call up a drop-down menu showing
various pre-set options for the level meter. Click on a choice from the list to
automatically configure the various settings to your selection. Where two
7 Appearance setting. Using this drop-down menu, you can select the
appearance of the meter to suit personal preference, or the audio material in
question.
8 Splits. These controls define the split points and colours for the 3 sections of
the meter. To understand these options more clearly try adjusting the settings
with the meter appearance set in ‘Sharp’ mode [7], if you get lost simply select
a pre-set [6]. and begin experimenting again.
9 Splits. These controls define the split points and colours for the 3 sections of
the meter. To understand these options more clearly try adjusting the settings
with the meter appearance set in ‘Sharp’ mode [7], if you get lost simply select
a pre-set [6]. and begin experimenting again.
10 Peak Controls. This section, outlined in grey, contains the parameters for
adjusting the peak-hold bar. The ‘Peak’ button toggles the function on/off. The
numeric window allows the peak hold time to be adjusted to suit personal
preference. The ‘infinite’ button overrides the peak hold time, setting it to hold
forever.
11 Meter ballistics. These values adjust the way in which the meter responds to
the incoming audio signal. The ‘Response’ parameter determines how quickly
the meter will jump up to the level of the audio, and the ‘fall-back’ parameter
determines how rapidly it falls back down again.
12 Margin. The margin indicates the dB remaining below true digital Full Scale. If
the audio clips (see the Setup and Stats module) this will be indicated with a
red warning light. Click in this area to reset the margin. The white, lager size
figure reflect the margin for the inner, primary meter, the smaller sized grey
figures represent the value for the outer, secondary meter (where appropriate).
13 Zoom and scroll zone. This is achieved by moving the mouse over the scale
and dragging along the line of the scale (vertically) to scroll, and dragging in a
perpendicular direction (horizontally) to zoom in/out. To reset the scale to the
default range hold down control (Ctrl) and click the scale. When zooming the
level meter, additional divisions at 1dB, 0.5dB and 0.1dB will show once the
scale is significantly expanded.
Note: RMS levels apply the standard –3dB correction so that pure sine waves read
at the same level on both RMS and Peak meters in accordance with hardware
mastering meters (Dorrough etc.) and the K-Metering mastering system.
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The spectrum analyser views are turned on using the spectrum analyser View
Selector controls [1]. The adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control
Panel [3] which is accessed via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
7 Zoom and scroll zone. Click and drag in this area to activate zoom and
scroll mode. Movement in a horizontal direction zooms the dB range and
movement in a vertical direction scrolls up and down. To reset the scale to the
full range hold down control (Ctrl) and click the scale.
8 Zoom and scroll zone. Click and drag in this area to activate zoom and scroll
mode. Movement in a vertical direction zooms the frequency range and
movement in a horizontal direction scrolls to the left and right. To reset the
scale to the full range hold down control (Ctrl) and click the scale.
9 View selector (Stereo Analyser – time averaging only). Click here to select
10 Freeze control. When selected, this control will freeze the view to capture an
‘instant’ in time. De-select to reactivate the dynamic view.
11 Fill control. Use this option to enable solid fill in the graphs displayed.
12 Frequency Banding Selector. Choose from smooth multiple point graph into
Octave, 1/3 Octave, 1/6 Octave, Bark, Bark thirds, Mel, Mel thirds and
Chromatic views. Bark and Mel are pycho-acoustic banding scales which
place greater definition in the frequency ranges where the ear is most
sensitive.
13 Peak-hold options. Turn on and off using the ‘Peak’ control. The peak-hold
time can be set using the numeric window or over-ridden by selecting ‘Infinite’,
which enables ‘hold forever’ mode.
14 Display ballistics. These values adjust the way in which the display responds
to the incoming audio signal. The ‘Response’ parameter determines how
quickly the meter will jump up to the level of the audio, and the ‘fall-back’
parameter determines how rapidly it falls back down again.
15 Colour Selection. Click to change the display colours, selecting from a grid
of colour options. The left hand side selects the fill colour and the right hand
side selects the peak envelope colour.
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The spectrogram views are turned on using the spectrogram View Selector controls
[1]. The adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control Panel [3] which is
accessed via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
8 Zoom and scroll zone. Click and drag in this area to activate zoom and scroll
mode. Movement in a vertical direction zooms the frequency range and
9 View selector (not Stereo Spectrogram). Click here to select various options
from a drop-down menu.
10 Smoothing. Select to smooth out the display data or deselect to view the raw
values.
11 Freeze control. When selected, this control will freeze the view to capture an
‘instant’ in time. De-select to reactivate the dynamic view.
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The Vectorscope view is turned on using the Vectorscope View Selector control [1].
The adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control Panel [3] which is
accessed via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
5 Zoom control. Use this to zoom in (X/Y simultaneously). Auto zoom will scale
the data to automatically fill the screen.
6 Freeze control. When selected, this control will freeze the view to capture an
‘instant’ in time. De-select to reactivate the dynamic view.
7 Join control. When active, this parameter joins the discreet points of the
graph to give a continuous display.
8 Response value. Adjusts the response time of the meter (please note - this
does not affect the “joined” lines if that option is selected).
9 Colour Selection. Click to change the display colours, selecting from a grid of
colour options.
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The Vectorscope view is turned on using the Vectorscope View Selector control [1].
The adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control Panel [3] which is
accessed via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
6 Freeze control. When selected, this control will freeze the view to capture an
‘instant’ in time. De-select to reactivate the dynamic view.
9 Colour Selection. Click to change the display colours, selecting from a grid
of colour options.
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The correlation meter view is turned on using the correlation meter View Selector
control [1]. The adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control Panel [3]
which is accessed via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
5 Zoom and scroll zone. Click and drag in this area to activate zoom and scroll
mode. Movement in a vertical direction zooms the frequency range and
movement in a horizontal direction scrolls to the left and right. To reset the
scale to the full range hold down control (Ctrl) and click the scale.
6 View selector. Click here to select between dynamic and time averaging
modes from a drop-down menu. The Time Averaging modes average the
displayed input over time.
7 Freeze control. When selected, this control will freeze the view to capture an
‘instant’ in time. De-select to reactivate the dynamic view.
8 Fill control. Use this option to enable solid fill in the graphs displayed.
9 Frequency Banding Selector. Choose from smooth multiple point graph into
Octave, 1/3 Octave, 1/6 Octave, Bark, Bark thirds, Mel, Mel thirds and
Chromatic views. Bark and Mel are pycho-acoustic banding scales which
place greater definition in the frequency ranges where the ear is most
10 Peak-hold options. Turn on and off using the ‘Peak’ control. The peak-hold
time can be set using the numeric window or over-ridden by selecting ‘Infinite’,
which enables ‘hold forever’ mode.
11 Display ballistics. These values adjust the way in which the display responds
to the incoming audio signal. The ‘Response’ parameter determines how
quickly the meter will jump up to the level of the audio, and the ‘fall-back’
parameter determines how rapidly it falls back down again.
12 Colour Selection. Click to change the display colours, selecting from a grid of
colour options. The left hand side selects the fill colour and the right hand side
selects the peak envelope colour.
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The correlation meter view is turned on using the correlation meter View Selector
control [1]. The adjustable parameters are displayed on the Edit Control Panel [3]
which is accessed via the adjacent Edit Selector control [2].
5 Freeze control. When selected, this control will freeze the view to capture an
‘instant’ in time. De-select to reactivate the dynamic view.
8 Colour Selection. Click to change the display colours, selecting from a grid of
colour options.
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The stats and setup view is turned on using the stats and setup View Selector control
[1]. There is no graphical display associated with this selection.
4 FFT window size. Choose from the drop down menu. The larger sizes are
recommended for use with the Time Averaging modes.
6 Clip Counter parameters. Visualizer constantly monitors the input signal for
clipping. The ‘number to clip’ parameter determines how many digital ‘overs’
(samples over 0dBFS) are required to be considered a ‘clip’. The ‘total’
parameter counts the total number of such clips. ‘Running’ records the largest
number of consecutive ‘over’ events in one section of clipped material, and
‘Blocks’ counts the number of events which qualify as a clip, i.e. the number of
events where the ‘overs’ exceed the number to clip parameter.
In addition to the ability to inspect individual audio sources in detail, Visualizer is also
equipped with an audio comparison mode. In this mode is it possible to compare the
main audio input to the plug-in with a secondary source. This is useful in a number of
different situations, for example, when comparing your audio against reference
tracks, notching out frequencies to create space for an instrument, or when
investigating the effects of a particular plug-in, by comparing the audio before and
after the effect.
To add a secondary audio source, insert the SEND plug-in into your project at the
point where you would like to 'tap' the comparison audio. Visualizer will automatically
locate the plug-in and activate the 'Compare' control. If multiple SEND plug-ins are
active, you may choose the appropriate source using the drop-down menu. For
detailed information about the SEND plug-in, please refer to the product manual.
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1 Attached 'SEND' plugin. If more than one SEND is available, click here to
choose from a drop-down list. The SEND plug-in is used as a Side-chain audio
reference to provide the secondary audio source for comparison.
This section is intended as a slightly more technical introduction to the world of FFT
analysis. It is not essential to understand the contents of this section to use
Visualizer, but a broad understanding of FFT analysis, and the trade-offs involved,
may help users appreciate some of the finer points.
Audio signals are represented as digital waveforms of signal value against time, so a
pure 1kHz tone signal is represented by a waveform, which rises and falls over time
in a sine-wave. However, this is not how the ear and brain perceive audio signals.
Our perception of audio is more to do with what frequencies are present in the signal,
and at what volumes, so, to give a useful visual representation of an audio signal, a
common approach is to try to display a graph showing the strength of any
frequencies in the signal.
Sample Rate:
Digital audio signals contain samples taken at a particular "sample-rate" (for example
44.1kHz). The higher the sample rate, the more disc space you need to store a given
length of audio, and the more processor power you need to manipulate it, but also,
the higher the frequencies you can store. Each sample rate has a maximum
frequency it can represent mathematically (called the Nyquist frequency), although it
could be argued that human perception of frequencies would start to degrade below
that absolute limit. As an example, a 44.1kHz audio signal, which was transformed by
an FFT, would not show any frequencies above 22.05kHz.
When an FFT is carried out on an audio signal, it is usually on separate chunks of the
signal, to give a reading of the frequencies present in each section of the audio. For
example, one could carry out an FFT on a 100ms section of audio to find out the
strengths of each frequency in that snippet. The number of samples in the chunk that
the FFT is applied to is called the "FFT sample size". There are trade-offs involved in
choosing the correct sample size to use. A small sample size will only contain a short
sample of audio data (for example a sample of 256 values from a 44.1kHz audio
signal will only be sampling over approximately 6ms), which means that it will be hard
for the FFT to accurately detect low frequencies (in our example, we are sampling
over 6ms, which corresponds to the wave-length of a signal near 170Hz, so we
couldn't expect any kind of accuracy for frequencies below this). Choosing a larger
sample size will give us more detail and accuracy in the lower frequency range,
however, as well as increasing the CPU loads slightly, this can lead to a lack of
responsiveness in the readings. As an example, if we are using a sample size of
16384 from a 44.1kHz audio signal, each chunk will be over approximately 350ms,
As FFTs are applied to limited sized chunks of an audio signal, they can only
approximate the frequencies, which are actually in that signal. Indeed, the
frequencies present in the signal might be changing over the period of that chunk.
By using different "windowing functions" the approximation of the FFT can be made
more precise in some ways at the expense of less accuracy in other ways. The main
trade off is of "frequency leakage" against "resolution". To illustrate the meaning of
these two terms consider an audio signal with a pure tone at 1kHz. In theory the
perfect frequency graph of this would have 0 at every frequency except at 1kHz,
where it would have a perfect spike up to the volume of that frequency. In reality, a
FFT graph from this signal will show a graph rising to a peak at 1kHz, and then
dropping off again. With better, that is less, frequency leakage, the regions of the
graph on the two sides of the peak would be lower (ie- less frequencies would be
leaking through where they shouldn't be). With better, that is higher, resolution, the
actual peak of the graph would be sharper. With a lower resolution, the peak of the
graph would be rounded, and flatter at the top. Higher resolution is more important
for distinguishing individual frequencies in a signal, lower leakage is more important
for signal which contain a lot of different frequencies. For audio signals, lower
leakage is usually more important, and so the default FFT window function in
Visualizer is chosen to have very low frequency leakage at the expense of some
resolution.
If you encounter a problem with any of NUGEN Audio's products, please let us know,
to help us improve them.
Please also state your operating system, and the rough specs for your machine
(e.g.- CPU speed, RAM) - in Windows XP you can get this information by right-
clicking "My Computer" and selecting properties.
Please be patient with any problems you may experience, particularly with products
at a beta stage of release. At NUGEN Audio we take problems with our software
seriously, and will endeavour to correct them as quickly as possible.