The design and implementation of an Open Source animation tool.

July 2, 2007

Fried Green Audio

For me, a frequent annoyance of audio applications is the need to actually play back audio to check the levels. If your audio's fried, you shouldn't have to listen through the whole thing watching the meter, it should be blindingly obvious right away.

Not only should the level meters and peak indicator update when you scrub audio (so many apps don't even do that!), I think peaking should be indicated in the waveform preview itself: if a pixel column in the preview waveform includes a sample which hits 0dB, that whole column should be colored red.While I'm at it, there should probably also be a similar (but more subdued) indication of sample ranges which are over some (settable) nominal level. If you're authoring for DVD, for instance, you generally want to keep your levels below -20dB.

Hmm. I guess in addition to a level meter, we should also have a master audio track where we can do master audio automation and get a waveform preview of the mix.

No comments: