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Improved "Cue Editor" Waveform View

Started by Qboy61, December 13, 2012, 08:31:18 AM

Qboy61

Let me first say that this program is very impressive.  It's ability to auto select cue points when loading tracks, the mixing of the tracks, and the overall intuitive operation is excellent.  I was able to get the program up and running in a few hours, and shortly after that, the application was running for nearly 40 days with no crashes of the mixing application.  A thanks goes to the work that's been put into the application so far.
When songs are read into the database and the cue points are automatically selected (95% perfect), sometimes the cue points need some "tweaking."  This seems a little difficult with linear plots of the waveform envelop making it hard to see song details in the amplitude below -20dB from full scale (maxbit).  One feature that would be useful in the "Cue Editor" would be to change the vertical scale presented when viewing the audio envelop in the editor.  I did a simulation to see if I could apply a simple function to improve the ability to see low amplitude areas of the waveform near the lead-in and lead-out.  I'm not sure if this would be helpful to you or not.
The plots on the top in the attached picture attempt to simulate the current view in the editor.  They are linear plots of the song's waveform with horizontal lines showing the "Silence Remover" thresholds at -24 (Mix Threshold), -40 (Start Level), and -50dB (End Level).  The details of the lead-in/out are not really observable.  The waveform plot is modified to show both left and right channels overlaid and processed with the equation:

signal = 20 * log10(abs(signal)+0.000001).

The new plots shown at the bottom of the attached picture are the same waveform with the same "Silence Remover" amplitudes plotted but now one can see that some of the lead-in of the song may be missed if the "Start Level Threshold" is set to -40dB.  Also time adjustment of the lead-out cue points is easier if one needs to deal with songs that have low amplitude details (below the default "Mix Threshold setting of -24dB).  The bottom of the plot could be set 10dB below the lowest "Silence Remover Threshold" value (in this example it's set to -60dB since my "End Level Threshold" was -50dB) to be able to observe the waveforms crossing of this cue point.

This is just a suggestion.  I'm not sure if it would be convenient for you to incorporate this in your code.  There are 1000's of ways to present this data and you may already have a more elegant solution.  Keep up the great work.


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