Unsatisfying spectrogram

[h-h]

Hello,

please let me say that I don't like the look very much of the spectrograms Audacity can display. Especially for the logarithmical view it lacks detailed information at the bottom that other software can display. I also strongly prefer to have silence black and sound white. Please see this image for an example of a detailed spectrogram: http://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/spectrogram.png.

[steve]

Please see here for how to change the spectrogram settings.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/sp ... ences.html

Currently there are only two colour maps, the default "blue / red / white" and "greyscale". A developer is currently working on a project to add other colour maps, so we may well see more options in the future.

[h-h]

I missed experimenting with all those settings. Still I want to say I would prefer vertical blurring instead of hard lines. Also the grayscale color map has the extreme values of black and light gray. In the future it would be great to have the full range of black to white.

[steve]

Still I want to say I would prefer vertical blurring instead of hard lines.

Is that anything more than eye candy that obscures the actual data?

[h-h]

There would just be a smooth fading instead of a hard line. The fading would mostly be in the lower part of a spectrogram with logarithmical presentation. The image I mentioned shows this. The data would not be obscured because in the center of a band there would be the brightness that's representative to the amplitude of that band. I also think it's more than eye candy because this way you are not distracted by those hard lines as if the band height were an additional information.

[steve]

I also think it's more than eye candy because this way you are not distracted by those hard lines as if the band height were an additional information.

That is my point: it IS additional information. It shows you the bandwidth of each frequency band that is being analyzed.

In its current form, you can clearly see that for small "Window Size" values, the lower frequency bands are very wide. If the bands are too wide to show the detail that you are looking for, then that tells you that you must increase the Window Size. On the other hand, if the bands were visually smoothed, then you would have no idea how wide the frequency bands are, or if you need to change the Window Size.

[h-h]

You turn on the logarithmical view to have the perceived height of the tones spaced equally on the y axis. For me, other scale information is distracting. For setup purpuses and people who like it, there should be an option to not smooth. I don't know of any other program displaying spectrograms that doesn't smooth.

[Gale Andrews]

Is unchecking "Grids" too extreme for you?

Gale

[h-h]

Is unchecking "Grids" too extreme for you?

I can't find what you are referring to.

[Gale Andrews]

Is unchecking "Grids" too extreme for you?

I can't find what you are referring to.

Sorry it was my mistake - I only skim read this and thought from "hard lines" that this had segued into talking about Plot Spectrum.


Gale