Analyzing DC Offset

The main thing that I’ve used it for is testing DC offset removal :smiley:
Adding offset is not something that one would be likely to use musically very often, though it could perhaps find use in synthesis or sampling. I think that it’s more likely to be used with non-audio signal processing (Audacity finds lots of weird and wonderful uses in classrooms).

There’s not much in the way of “documentation” for it as yet, though there is quite a lot of information about it in these two topics:

The tool was really developed as a tool for studying DC offset and experimenting with ways of removing it.

In brief,:
“Dynamic” compensates for offset using a “rolling average”, which enables it to cope with an offset that changes slowly over time.
“Absolute” is the method used in the Audacity Normalize effect.
“HP Filter” is a High-pass filter (as used in the LADSPA DC offset removal plug-in).
“Abs + Filter” is the above two, one after the other.
“Equal +/- Peaks” is not actually “offset removal”, but centres the waveform according to the maximum positive and negative peaks.

“How much to add” has a range of +/- 1 (as it says in the interface) and is the same scale as the default vertical scale of a wave track.

I would expect a practical “bias compensation” tool would have a much more simple interface, and would probably be for bias removal only. I’d like the default setting to be an “auto” setting, where the plug-in just does it for you, using the most appropriate method for the material.