Audacity Forum

I just read through all of this interesting old thread. Steve, did you pursue the project of dummycompressor.ny any further?

What I would like is an option for dB on the "normal" linear view (as is more usual in other audio editors), but that's not easy either. Can you explain more? I don't know what you mean. Have you asked for that before? Gale I thought steve meant a relabelling of the vertical scale of Waveform view,...

Ah, I should get out of 2.0.3 one of these days.

But why discrete choices anyway?

I guess another good question about views, is why the dB floor or the spectrogram window or window type can't be varied independently among tracks. But of course that means somehow adding controls to tracks.

Do you know why I can't choose any lower limit between -60 and -96, Steve? Someone told me it complicates the math, but I don't get why it would.

I never use Waveform dB and I suspect few other people do, either. It's harder to edit in dB, almost impossible if you are in values higher than 60. It is my favorite view for editing voice! I do not understand why you think it is "harder to edit." I like how little crackles are more easily seen, a...

There are only a few choices for the bottom of the scale in preferences. Would there be any special difficulty in letting you choose any dB value within certain bounds?

There are also no gradations for the negative part of the wave.

The noise floor feature is quirky too. I figured out it really means "stop raising the gain while sound is below the noise floor" but gain might be low or high coming into the noise depending on what precedes. Noise after quiet signal gets raised more.

Have you ever looked at histograms for peak dB minus rms dB? For a square wave it is 0, for a sine wave it is 3, for speech it would vary a lot but sometimes be large. I often see very asymmetrical waveforms in vowels, tall narrow peaks balancing broader lower excursions on the opposite side of the ...

Hm, you take histograms of mean-square over 100 ms intervals, or something like that?

Does that tend to a bimodal distribution of "speech" and "pauses?"