Audacity Forum

Mac OS-X 10.4.11 Intel Mac Mini. Very stable. Both 1.2.5 and 1.3.5 installed, only 1.3.5 running.

I ran into this when I was answering the noise reduction question. I tried to normalize the show to -3 to make it a little louder before I posted it for inspection. It didn't work right, so I threw in the towel and posted it as is.

Now I'm paying attention. I put my incredibly seductive piano solo on the timeline and normalized it to -3. It blew up the waveform so the peaks went to 0 or possibly beyond. Wait, that's not right...

I tried normalizing to -1 and it didn't seem to change very much. I tried normalizing to -10 and the waveform exploded and filled up the timeline like I drew it with a square, blue magic marker. Clip and distortion city. It's going the wrong way.

I know I'm the only one on a Mac. This could be fun.


Oh, wait. Never mind. There is a very tiny negative sign to the left of the data entry window. When I typed [-10] ....

I bet I can turn this into a feature request..

Koz

kozikowski wrote:Oh, wait. Never mind. There is a very tiny negative sign to the left of the data entry window. When I typed [-10] ....I bet I can turn this into a feature request..
Koz

I suspect we ought to make you get your clipping with the Amplify effect. I'll see if I can get it fixed.

Gale

Koz, wonderfull, that made me ROTFL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotfl) .
{{added: post-analysis shows your post has exactly the right length. How do you know ...}}

Now I am happy I read the Forum.

On -devel, there is only
<<We'd treat this as a bug wouldn't we, considering it ignores plus signs?>>
which I had to read twice and therefore it did not make me laugh.

jan.kolar wrote:Koz, wonderfull, that made me ROTFL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotfl)
On -devel, there is only
<<We'd treat this as a bug wouldn't we, considering it ignores plus signs?>>
which I had to read twice and therefore it did not make me laugh.

Wasn't "I suspect we ought to make you get your clipping with the Amplify effect" funny? OK then I never was much of a comedian..... The point I was "trying" to make was that we don't let users clip deliberately in normalize by adding + in front of the figure, so I don't think we'd want to let them clip by accident when putting "-" in front?

Gale

<<<I never was much of a comedian>>>

I'll roll on the floor if you want.

In Windows, we can have a complicated kluge with many instructons and wikis. On a Mac, it would just do what I wanted (normalize to -3dBFS and ignore any + or -).

Koz

<<Wasn't "I suspect we ought to make you get your clipping with the Amplify effect" funny? OK then I never was much of a comedian.....>>
Ouch, I am sorry. This was too complicated for my english: Four verbs, and not sure what 'ought' exactly means there and what is 'his clipping'.

Neither I understand what Koz means by the following:
<<In Windows, we can have a complicated kluge with many instruct[i?]ons and wikis. On a Mac, it would just do what I wanted (normalize to -3dBFS and ignore any + or -).>>
Are there any plus minus differences on Window and Mac ?
[If minus is too small or badly positioned, that might be fixed - repositioned and/or replaced by another character (hyphen?) or its size changed.]

<<The point I was "trying" to make was that we don't let users clip deliberately in normalize by adding + in front of the figure,>>

Unary plus is to be ignored ( +3 denotes the same number as 3 )

Minus minus is plus.

Minus is never to be ignored.

<<so I don't think we'd want to let them clip by accident when putting "-" in front? >>
I new about the current behaviour, and was no problem for me. After Koz had that experience, its certainly worth considering it, provided he thinks it should change (does he?).
Consider also:
- consistency with other software
- Perhaps somebody wants +0,5dB clipping. But he will not notice -0.5 normalization was done instead
- consider to put the changed value to qpref, so the user next time sees we had done something to his input.


OFF TOPIC:
Something has to be done with snap to and select whole track / select all.
I wanted to look on the size of minus in the dialog.
Record - 1/2s - Stop (some sound to get into the dialog)
Select track (by mouse) -- nothing is selected
Select all -- nothing
select track -- nothing
Record - 1/2 - Stop (new track)
select track -- nothing
Select all -- nothing
select track -- nothing
select track -- nothing
select track -- nothing
select track -- nothing
select track -- nothing

The point is that I have Snap To [seconds].

MINUS MINUS (so this one might be on topic :-) ? )
I wrote <<Minus minus is plus>> and <<Minus is never to be ignored.>>
OK, I pretend to be very clever, but I can get foolled easily.
My current selection starts at " 0 0 h 0 0 m - 1.- 21 s " and I have no idea what that means.
When it was " 0 0 h 0 0 m 0 0.- 21 s " in past, I thought I know what it means. So I have three questions:
1. How long is my selection ? (To be determined from the screen shot ! The format is hh:mm:ss + milliseconds)
2. Is that fixed already?
3. Can you put three minuses below "Selection Start:"? How many dots can be there (in that format) ?

[I think I reported both but I did not know this aspects of it until just now.]

Re Snap-to, you could select all of the track(s) which are shorter than one second by dragging the selection region so that it covers a whole second. It's a bit of a fringe case because select all would work if any of the other tracks were longer than a second, and snap-to is off by default. Would not being able to select less than the snap-to limit defeat the purpose of it? Maybe I should note this in the manual rather than suggest it should be fixed.

Re the image, you dragged the selection behind time zero. What the "Selection Start" calculation has done is insert "-" in front of the time to reflect it's behind zero, and hide the last thousandth of a second digit to make room for the inserted "-". That is reasonable in principle (unless we were to indicate time behind zero in some other way), but the problem is that it can't cope where the position is close to a whole second. So in your image, the start time should be "-1.-02", but in fact it shows "-1.-21" which you could also get by sliding the track to 1.210 seconds behind zero. That's a bug which just was not thought through enough. Determine the selection length by clicking the "Length" radio button (I think that works OK). Yes I think if you dragged over an hour behind zero, the hour figure would be prefaced by a minus.

I'll find some place to record this selection bar bug behind zero.


Gale

re Snap To:
If it is longer than one second, It still does not sellect whole track or 'all', it leaves last uncomplete second unselected
(this is what I reported a time ago, I think).
So 'longer than one second' does not produce expected behaviour either.

re the image
no, no, no
No, I did not drag. (I am afraid I do NOT know how to select before zero by dragging.) I think I did record, record, and select track/all.
No, it did not consciously insert minus, it blindly called sprintf() or like.
No, I do not think it did shift the digits and hiden thousandths in this particular case !!
No, it is not reasonoble, nor in principle reasonable to shift here the digits and to hide thousandths digit
yes, the problem is [that it cannot cope].
No, the problem is not with 'close to second', the problem is it cannot cope with negative numbers.
By fortune you hit almost-yes, the start time should be -1.021, certainly not -1.-02.
But you did by mistake, because if the start would be -1.210, it should show -1.210, not -1.021 nor -1.-21.
Yes, you could get the same to be shown with different start possion.
yes, That's a bug which was not thought through enough but I would omit 'just' from this sentence
No, I will not <<Determine the selection length by clicking the "Length" radio button'>> The question was whether you can read the start time properly, and from the above you certainly did it read wrong (no wonder). <<(I think that works OK)>> I think the same.

<<Yes I think if you dragged over an hour behind zero, the hour figure would be prefaced by a minus>>
Excelent, you got half a point. (I did not try but I expect the same.)
And how many dots? -- (This might be a different bug, of course if you can replicate it. This one would be really minor, I think).


<<I'll find some place to record this selection bar bug behind zero.>>
Huraaaa. Thank you. (Perhaps I could save some writing if reading this first. Thought, is it bug or is it reasonable?)
As regards wording, it should say the digits should be never shifted in this kind of display.

Neither the "+" nor the "-" sign should be allowed inside the normalize window, or they should be allowed, but not paid attention to. If the user-entered number is interpreted incorrectly, it will lead to Audacity normalizing the show to an irrational number and creating damage. If the signs remain valid, then Audacity needs to pop up a window warning of damage like what happens in Amplify. Far easier to just ignore both signs.

The Windows joke has to do with engineers and programmers producing the product instead of human behavior people. I was a Windows person for years and I still have many machines running around the house. I bought a network switch that requires a PC for proper setup.

As of the OS-X Revolution, however, I and a great number of programmers and engineers now run Macs. There's just something about ease of use, stability, and a powerful command line terminal on the same machine. I'm on my third one. My HiDef "VCR" is a Mac.

http://www.kozco.com/mytv/mytv.html

Another engineer here at work produced a similar product with a PC. Oddly enough, his wife is still speaking to him.

Koz

<<The Windows joke>>

I miss so many jokes...


A minute ago I read about 'playing down the colossal audacity' (http://www.singinst.org/upload/artifici ... e-risk.pdf) which made me lookup in dictionary ... after more than two months...


Back to windows...
Ou yeah, this is very special culture. Currently I am forced to move from english XP to czech XP, can you imagine?
Needed to find out what a WiFi error actually means, tried help.
The message was in spirit ' no network, try switching the switch on ' (which I interpret 'either no network, or the device off [but I dont want to tell you, because I love you and want to keep you safe from danger of understanding ] ' -- which one?? And there is no switch. Furtunatelly I saw a laptop with a switch previously... ).
The help was like 'to find out, press this button then that button.'
Names of buttons I had to traslate from Czech to English and then back to Czech, to find the button.
And I landed in the same window with the same error message...
Thouse were my second 5 minutes with czech XP.
The first 5 minutes I was trying to unhide hiding files, file types etc.