Use Visual Properties to configure real-time visuals. Up to 10 visuals may be active, depending on the number of channes in the file and the settings selected. The default settings show a status visual, a level visual, and two graph visuals for the left and right channels. The status visual is located at the upper left side. It displays elapsed time and playback and recording status. The level visual is located at the upper right side. It shows the current output or input as horizontal bar meters. The left and right graph visuals display audio in a variety of ways, as described in the Description of Visuals table below.
Resize the Control window to make visuals larger or smaller.
| Visual Settings | |
|---|---|
| Setting | Description |
| Visuals | Sets the number of visuals to display. The 2 Mixed option combines multichannel into stereo. The center and low frequency channels are mixed in with the left and right channels. Usually each channel is graphed separately in each visual. Some visuals, such as the VU Meter or X-Y Graph may use more than one channel. |
| Frame Rate | Sets the number of times per second that visuals are updated and drawn. A value of 60 or less gives good results. Use higher values to get an extra detailed spectrogram or envelope. The actual frame rate is limited by your system's processing power. Use a lower frame rate for older systems or when the Control window is large. |
| Status, Level, Channel... |
Use these drop down lists to select a visual for the status
level, or channel graphs. Visuals are described in the
table below. The number of
visuals shown is set by the Visuals setting above.
Some visuals have properties such as axes ranges, colours, display modes, etc. Use the Properties button to the right of the drop down list to set the properties. |
| Quick Select Menu | Use this list to select your favourite visuals. The selected visuals appear in the popup menu when you right-click on a visual in the Control window. |
| Visual FFT Settings | See FFT Settings for more information about these settings. Minimum dB sets the lowest dB level that visuals will show. |
| Description of Visuals | |
|---|---|
| Visual | Description |
| 3D Bars | 3 dimensional logarithmic frequency 11 band bar graph. |
| Analog Meter | Scaled amplitude needle meter. |
| Bars | Logarithmic frequency 11 band bar graph, commonly found on stereo systems. |
| Blank | Disables the visual and may improve performance on slower systems. |
| Blowing Inferno | Fire coloured, double-sided spectrum graph. |
| Bulge | Symmetrical, colourful frequency graph. |
| Envelope | Amplitude envelope. |
| Spectrogram | Coloured frequency spectrum, with time on the x-axis, frequency on the y-axis and colour as the magnitude. The colours, in increasing magnitude, are black, purple, blue, cyan, green, yellow, red, and white. A cyan point, for example, is higher magnitude than a blue point. |
| Spectrum | Frequency analysis of the sound. |
| VU Meter | Horizontal peak and current amplitude level meter. |
| Waterfall | Flowing, coloured spectrogram. |
| Waveform | Standard amplitude waveform, much like the 1:1 zoom level in a Sound window. |
| X-Y Graph | The sound is plotted with the left channel against the right channel to generate Lissajous patterns. This is often used to see the phase difference between two equal frequency signals. If the left and right channels are in phase, the pattern is a diagonal line running from the lower left to the upper right. If the channels are 90 degrees out of phase, the pattern is a circle. For general stereo sounds, it looks like a crazy scribble. The larger the scribble, the larger the difference between the channels. Monaural sounds always show a diagonal line since the left and right data are the same. |