Photosounder Spiral CM now out and about

[A_SN]

I'm not good at math and all this, but it was nice reading about the technical stuff! If you like this stuff (gamma-compressed color space bla bla) I remember reading some nice technical things about this in 3d engine. Google "Uncharted 2 hdr lighting" or "Uncharted 2 gamma correction", there's a guy that done about 300 PowerPoint slides about this.

Yeah the first part of the slideshow explains the whole issue of gamma correctly (although they use an incorrect formula, sRGB isn't a gamma of 2.2, it's a more complicated formula than that, 2.2 is just an approximation), so you can see why it's important for what I do. Which reminds me, I left out the best part of the development of Spiral. My display was uncalibrated, which posed a problem because I had no idea whether my interface design would look too dark or too bright on a better adjusted screen, so I made a calibration program that makes you do about ten tests in succession (you look at a pattern and adjust a slider, then move on to the next test where it makes you choose a new value between the previously chosen value and another, and so on) and that gives you a pretty accurate display profile which is then corrected for . I didn't get to polish it and release it though, but it definitely was a big part of getting Spiral to look right (and I'm pretty glad to finally look at a calibrated display, although it's a TN panel so the gamma changes dramatically with the angle, which sucks).

[xx JPRacer xx]

^ About cheap LCD panels, is all you efforts really make a difference on 6-bit, full of dithering TN panels or you need ultra-high quality 10-bit ones?

[A_SN]

^ About cheap LCD panels, is all you efforts really make a difference on 6-bit, full of dithering TN panels or you need ultra-high quality 10-bit ones?

Ironically the point of using my 48-bit format is not to have better quality or anything like that but rather to get the maths right, so the difference will show even on 6-bit screens, like in that slideshow with the shading of balls. The reason why there's 12 bits per colour in my format is that basically you need 4 more bits in linear colour space to represent the darkest levels with as much fidelity as in 8-bit sRGB (if you look at the sRGB formula you'll see for the lowest levels below 10 the formula is simply to divide by 12.92, so to accommodate that extra almost-13-fold extra precision in darks you need at least 4 extra bits). So in Spiral it's just a case of doing everything in 12-bits, then throwing those 12 bits into a look-up table out of which come 8-bits in familiar gamma compressed sRGB format. Actually I believe there's an issue with many video games which do the math in linear space (most things that use the GPU for graphical stuff get it right I think), so the issue arises when you store a texture in 8-bit linear, you get very visible banding around the darks because you don't have the 4 extra bits, so it looks like you're 4 bits short.

When I do need more precision then I use 15 bits (as I actually do when Spiral computes the interface) then use Gaussian noise dithering to avoid banding, which is why if you look carefully Spiral's background gradient it's somewhat noisy to prevent just that. In some cases I even use a different dithering at every frame to give a superior precision on a 8-bit display (I even wrote a whole big thing on the topic while working on Spiral http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1579 ... pp-display ) but I figured that for Spiral it would be overkill, it's not like you ever see any banding.

[xx JPRacer xx]

It seem you really know your gfx stuff. It's rare to see audio DSP programmers with good knowledge of this.

[A_SN]

It seem you really know your gfx stuff. It's rare to see audio DSP programmers with good knowledge of this.

Not so surprising given that Photosounder is more image editor than audio editor .

[A_SN]

Here's some of my progress, that thing to visualise the pan colour gradient, visualise the pan content (in the form of black bars, like an absorption spectrum) and pan windowing. All of those things put together help you have a good idea of what's happening globally in pan and help you know what you're doing when trying to window just what you want.



The slightly windowed version looks pretty nice:


No new build yet, I'll add more things before I release a new build as this is somewhat time consuming to build all the 20 versions.

[A_SN]

New release with details in this thread http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5466724 (I made a new thread so I can post updates on the first post there).

[Panphobia]

As for displaying midi, isn't it just better to display the synthesised sound?

No:





and



are just a few examples of the possibilities of midi driven animations. Of course there are advantages of each, and your new plugin is amazing (I will get it for sure when I have the time to play with it:)

[A_SN]

As for displaying midi, isn't it just better to display the synthesised sound?

No

Did you try looking at those with Spiral though? Cause I just did and it's pretty much what you want already. That's why I suggested displaying the synthesised sound, there's not a lot of advantages to only displaying the pure aseptic MIDI information.

[busywait]

Hello, I love your new visualizer - I've been playing with Spiral CM version from Computer Music magazine.

As a perpetual beginner musician it was eye-opening to just sing in to the microphone and instantly see how far off-tune I was, and also when I lined up with the 12-o'clock position on C, see the harmonics on the i-iii-v positions of the major chord.

It's going to be my instrument tuner now I think too. I just learned that my daughters Bb clarinet is a "transposing instrument" when she blew a C and it came up as a Bb note in the visualizer. Cool.

I also love the simplicity of it - just one control, though instantly wanted the "Key" control from the full version. (In the UI, can you also just double-click a note to bring it to the top, or drag the note I want to the top?)

However, the other features of the full version don't excite me. And though I want to give you some money, I agree with the "looks expensive" comments. My DAW, Tracktion, is $60.

Compared with Blue Cat Frequency Analyser (Free or Pro), Spiral is more expensive.

Are the VSTs you've called out above tools from established big names that support compliance to particular regulations?

[A_SN]

Hello, I love your new visualizer - I've been playing with Spiral CM version from Computer Music magazine.

As a perpetual beginner musician it was eye-opening to just sing in to the microphone and instantly see how far off-tune I was, and also when I lined up with the 12-o'clock position on C, see the harmonics on the i-iii-v positions of the major chord.

It's going to be my instrument tuner now I think too. I just learned that my daughters Bb clarinet is a "transposing instrument" when she blew a C and it came up as a Bb note in the visualizer. Cool.

I also love the simplicity of it - just one control, though instantly wanted the "Key" control from the full version. (In the UI, can you also just double-click a note to bring it to the top, or drag the note I want to the top?)

However, the other features of the full version don't excite me. And though I want to give you some money, I agree with the "looks expensive" comments. My DAW, Tracktion, is $60.

Compared with Blue Cat Frequency Analyser (Free or Pro), Spiral is more expensive.

Are the VSTs you've called out above tools from established big names that support compliance to particular regulations?

Well you can't do what you said you did with Spiral with the Blue Cat thing (or anything else for that matter), so the comparison is moot, isn't it? The whole point of Spiral is that it's not just another curve-displaying analyser, or any variant of that like the gimmicky but unpractical 3D things, it does something much more interesting and useful than that.

Also since you have the Computer Music magazine code Spiral is cheap than the Blue Cat thing, and even without it it's cheaper if you buy it from Europe because I don't charge extra taxes.

Also the 'full' version isn't full yet as I'm still working on the whole time stretching thing (Blue Cat's analyser doesn't have that either does it?) and also working on some optimisation, particularly when rotating the whole display, it happens too slowly. Might not mean much to you but to me the time stretching is a big deal to use Spiral for learning, and that's what primarily what I made Spiral for. If use SpiralCM mostly for analysing live things like your singing or playing then you wouldn't need that anyway. But the bottom line is, SplineEQ is cheap because there are better more fully featured EQs out there, they just cost 10 times as much, whereas nothing comes close to Spiral (it would be quite a stretch to claim otherwise). But just out of curiosity, how much would you shell out for this (although given that you have a pretty good version of it for free I guess that's a factor)? Not that I would consider dropping the price, just wondering.

As for the compliance to regulations, you realise that those things are pretty simple algorithms that are already well defined, right? I never understood why this was an excuse to jack up the price.

[busywait]

I was not suggesting that the Blue Cat products have the same intent, but that they are "FFT + visualization" - I thought that made them "similar raw material cost"

Your Spiral is the only *implementation* of the circular visual that I've seen.

I can do time stretching and looping in my DAW. Why will it help me to learn how to do this in your VST instead? They sound like important features in a stand alone Spiral app, but not in a VST. (BTW, I think you should do a stand alone app, SAVIHost might be an annoyance for many people interested in what you have created. Charge more for it.)

For stereo, I can have two instances of SpiralCM, is that going to as clear as your combined presentation in the full version? I didn't really get the panning features. Maybe I would I if used them? I do get absorption spectra though, I have a PhD in spectroscopy

Looking at the screen shots of the full version the number of controls scare me. Which controls could you miss out?

My ideal Spiral would have these controls, in this priority order:
- Gain
- Key
- Switch from Sharps to Flats in the labels
- FFT resolution
- Switch to Roman numerals in the labels (I - VII)
- Maybe stereo/pan too, when I know what it does!

Charge $60, $40 discounted and I wouldn't have raised my eyebrows so far. $20-$30 "no question", for me at least.

Charge extra for a version with overlays, or to enable overlays. Even more for the version that does pitch correction

I know that often simple things like metering are expensive. Is it because the engineers and producers are getting paid to put out compliant product? I don't get paid to learn music.

I just paid for your full version

[A_SN]

I was not suggesting that the Blue Cat products have the same intent, but that they are "FFT + visualization" - I thought that made them "similar raw material cost"

Ha, I wouldn't say that . The FFT part is as easy as pie, we all have some FFT code lying around ready for use and there's really not much to it, it's the visualisation part that's the big difference, there's a indeed a big difference between your run of the mill curves and spectrogram (except the 3D part, that takes more effort, but on the other hand 3D spectrograms have been around since the 1990s) and what Spiral does, mostly with its fancy schmancy original perceptual colour space, but that's not all there is to Spiral either, there's more to it.

Your Spiral is the only *implementation* of the circular visual that I've seen.

I can do time stretching and looping in my DAW. Why will it help me to learn how to do this in your VST instead? They sound like important features in a stand alone Spiral app, but not in a VST. (BTW, I think you should do a stand alone app, SAVIHost might be an annoyance for many people interested in what you have created. Charge more for it.)

Well for one thing my time stretching is the best in the whole wide world (seriously, you can check it out in Photosounder, at large ratios at least it's the best), and then I'm not sure what your question is, it's just great being able to play back a part of a sound you want to analyse in detail at a much slower rate while hearing the result in great quality. You're right about the standalone app though, that's in my plans, I just have to figure out what's the best way to turn a plugin into an app. There's also the problem of making a program that handles sound input and output correctly, and given some of the problems I've had with some hosts it doesn't seem like a trivial thing to get right. But I'll do it anyway, I'll have to crack that nut sooner or later anyway.

For stereo, I can have two instances of SpiralCM, is that going to as clear as your combined presentation in the full version? I didn't really get the panning features. Maybe I would I if used them? I do get absorption spectra though, I have a PhD in spectroscopy

Not even close the interest of the coloured stereo pan representation is that with proper stereo separation (as in forget about the mixes where everything is centered, they might as well be mono) it helps you a lot telling what is what by giving different instruments different colours so you can tell them apart much more easily. When I go back and look at a mono mix of the same kind of density I almost give up cause then everything is just blended together with no helpful colours to tell anything apart. The pan windowing helps you an extra bit by allowing you to entirely remove some instruments from the visualisation, so you can focus on something specific, and the 'absorption spectra' helps you figure out where is what exactly (it doesn't have much in common with spectroscopy other than looking alike, sorry, just when you thought your spectrographic education was about to become useful for something else ).

Looking at the screen shots of the full version the number of controls scare me. Which controls could you miss out?

My ideal Spiral would have these controls, in this priority order:
- Gain
- Key
- Switch from Sharps to Flats in the labels
- FFT resolution
- Switch to Roman numerals in the labels (I - VII)
- Maybe stereo/pan too, when I know what it does!

Charge $60, $40 discounted and I wouldn't have raised my eyebrows so far. $20-$30 "no question", for me at least.

Charge extra for a version with overlays, or to enable overlays. Even more for the version that does pitch correction

I know that often simple things like metering are expensive. Is it because the engineers and producers are getting paid to put out compliant product? I don't get paid to learn music.

I just paid for your full version

Well right now 10 of the controls only do stereo colour gradient stuff, so if you're happy with the gradient as it is you can forget about that big block of controls! In time you'll figure out which controls you can safely ignore . I for one feel the need for all of them, and there's enough screen room for that (actually I might have some extra room left in the end). I like your idea of using Roman numerals, but how would it be like, I-IIm-IIM-IIIm-IIIM-IV-T-V-VIm-VIM-VIIm-VIIM ? Might be a bit heavy.

As for why metering products are expensive, well, I just think that developers like to charge as much as they feel they can get away with, so if they make a meter that's just a simple measure of dB or whatever that doesn't sound fancy so you can't really charge much for it. But if you say it complies with IBU-8131BTS-135.04 then suddenly it sounds pro and you can add a few hundred bucks to your price tag. Basically in general I think price tags correlate best with how you can hype up your product, and when you make a piece of software do what specialised hardware does then that's the simplest way to make something sound worthy of a high 'professional' price. Usually our only expense is our time spent working on something, but that's not reflected in the price tag because you might spend a couple of days working out some metering standard and you might spend a month doing nice fast antialiased graphics, but the metering standard thing will impact the price tag a lot more than some graphical details (just look at all those ultra-expensive plugins that have nothing but really aliased graphics for instance).

[busywait]

I think I better write some metering plugins then I've never written a VST before, is it hard?

I've been playing with the full Spiral version. Stereo works well. I'd still love a way to hide all the "not used very often" controls. I only used "Key". Actually I used mono/stereo, but much less often.

The stereo field colour gradient thing seemed like an unrelated visualization to me.

Is there extra information in the colours of the gradient, or can I see everything that is going on from the darkness and position of the black lines?

[A_SN]

I think I better write some metering plugins then I've never written a VST before, is it hard?

I've been playing with the full Spiral version. Stereo works well. I'd still love a way to hide all the "not used very often" controls. I only used "Key". Actually I used mono/stereo, but much less often.

The stereo field colour gradient thing seemed like an unrelated visualization to me.

Is there extra information in the colours of the gradient, or can I see everything that is going on from the darkness and position of the black lines?

I wouldn't say it's hard, although you have to be good at coding everything yourself, mostly for the GUI, so it's better to have relevant programming experience.

And the darkness and position says it all.