On Thursday, October 23, 2003, at 12:22 PM, Ben Kennedy wrote:
On 23 10 2003 at 6:18 am -0400, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
I wonder if it would be possible to add some sort of "export output peak meter" feature to DB, so that keeping the export levels high without distorting at the peaks would take less guesswork? I'm not really sure what how the whole export-to-file mechanism works in terms of levels and so forth.
I've thought about this. The problem is that it basically requires rendering the entire song, since without doing so, one cannot guess about where the peaks will be (due to additive mixing).
What if a volume/level meter was built into the UI instead, which simply showed where you were at while it played, then the onus to make sure it doesn't clip is on the user. I've seen audio apps that show a notice when a clip occurs (ie. the red part of the meter says "clip" and stays red), so that it's easy for the user to see when and where it happened, then bring the volume of that one hit down a bit. Cheers, Lux
Now, it would be relatively easy to add a warning that would come up after export saying "sorry guy, your mixdown clipped, want to try again?". Maybe that would be helpful, but I could also see it being irritating. :)
Having said this... it may be worth having a pre-flight feature that would zip through the mix (taking about the same amount of time as a full export) and then suggest what level to set for optimal gain without clipping.
This could be dicey, though, because as soon as anything is tampered with (e.g. new drum added, even the tempo changed ever so slightly) the value would become stale.
Another idea I have had in the back of my mind for awhile now is running another thread that would, in essence, constantly mix down the song in the background during editing. The result would be that exporting would be much faster, and level analysis like this could be done in more-or- less real time. It would probably be a noticeable performance penalty though.
another preference here: whether hitting stop/spacebar lets the last initiated sample "ring" or whether it just stops everything dead?
That is more a cosmetic issue than a practical one, and wouldn't be too difficult to implement. Would it be worth having a separate preference setting for, though, or should we just take a vote? :)
-ben
-- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca
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