Audacity Forum

For the Draw tool It is hard to Draw a wave mathematically because it is hard to see when it is perfectly inline with the ruller.
What if there was a grid or if a yellow line showed up pointing you to the cloest digit.

or if there was a grid. The Grid would only show up when you zoom into the dots while using the Draw tool.

Even with grids it's very hard to draw precise shapes.
Let's say you want to draw a line from 0.0 at time=0 up to +1.0 at time=1 second. For a sample rate of 44100 Hz you will need to carefully position 44100 dots. The first three dots will need to have values of 0.0, 0.0000226757 and 0.0000453515.
To "draw" mathematically you really need to use code, and it's quite easy to do so using Nyquist programming language. For example, to draw the aforementioned "ramp", you could enter the following code into the "Nyquist Prompt" effect (in the "Effect" menu), which has got to be easier than trying to precisely draw 44100 dots.

Why do you need to use the draw tool anyway, is there a particular reason?

For me it is largely superseded by the Repair effect which will fix/redraw up to 128 selected samples by interpolating from neighbouring waveforms.

WC

I use the Draw tool to draw a wave.Then I repeat the wave so its long enough for something to start out with. It helps make an original starting point for a tone for an instrument in synthfont and other things.
the Grid idea would just make it easier to make patterns that match. I would find it useful.
it could be toggled on and off in preferences.

Murky effects wrote:I use the Draw tool to draw a wave.Then I repeat the wave so its long enough for something to start out with. It helps make an original starting point for a tone ...

Can't the Audacity command Generate > Tone do that job for you? Or are you drawing a more complex waveform than a simple tone? I'm curious.

WC

I'm certainly not against the idea of some sort of guide line to show the amplitude level position of the pointer as I think it could be useful in many situations. It may also benefit from having a numerical readout in the status bar. However, I'm not yet convinced about it as being particularly useful for drawing waveforms. Perhaps you (Murky effects) could tell us a bit more about the type of waveforms that you are wanting to draw, and in what way this feature would be helpful.

I just like to be able to draw a pattern and then loop it. The grid Idea means that when I'm drawing a wave I can go up in steps like 0.10 0.20 0.30 and have it accurate faster.
I dont know how to do code. But I like the visual approach.

Another idea would be if you could hold shift or something and select a group of the dots say if I want to move five dots all to the same point. it would save alot of time.

Murky effects wrote:Another idea would be if you could hold shift or something and select a group of the dots say if I want to move five dots all to the same point. it would save alot of time.

I could make a plug-in that will generate a number of samples to a value if that would be useful to you.
What the heck, it'll only take a couple of minutes to write......
here's a sample generator plug-in. See here for how to install Nyquist plug-ins http://audacityteam.org/download/plugins
The plug-in will appear in the Generate menu after you restart Audacity and will be listed as "Sample Generator..."

Thanks Steve. Ill try it out.

Let me know how you get on with it, and if there's any additional features that I could add to make it more useful.

I think it would be useful for there to be a lot more waveform generators in addition to the current Sine, triangle, square, silence and noise. If you have any suggestions / ideas about this, please post them.