Interpreting the waveform display

[wallewek]

I feel like this must be a dumb question but I can't find it documented anywhere.  If you can point me to there I'd really appreciate it.

When I edit my recordings, cleaning up noise and splitting tracks, the waveform display is really important, and I love the way it works.  But there's something I can't help feeling I must be missing.

First, are the upper and lower before and after, or different channels?  If the latter, why are they so different?  Also, what do the colors mean?  I see two kinds of green, plus grey.

Am I doing something wrong?  Here's a picture example:

Thanks!

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

The upper trace is the left-hand channel and the lower trace the right.  You probably clicked on the 'play left / right channel only' button in the toolbar to get the display looking like that (grey, in that context, means 'disabled').

The paler green is a simplified version of the waveform display which is intended to help identify track breaks (not sure if it helps much).  You can turn it off via Menu -> Options -> Cursor Options -> Show Simplified Waveform Display if you don't like it.

[wallewek]

Perfect!  Thanks!  Couple of thoughts:

Indeed, getting track breaks right takes a lot of time fiddling to get starts and ends right.  It might help if the vertical scale showed numbers on both the Cleanup and Split screens, to set the start/end levels better.

Also, your various popup screens are very helpful, but I always have to close them to use the contents.  I think this is what they call "modal" dialogs, right?  You probably can't do this, but is there any way to leave them open when I return to the parent screen?

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

If you're finding track splitting difficult, you might like to take a look at our video on the subject.  You'll find a link to it here:

https://www.alpinesoft.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=725.0

I agree that a vertical zoom would help with recordings with a low recording level, but we do boost the display in that case.

Changing all the popups would be a lot of work, but there's a link there to copy the message to the clipboard.  You can then paste it into (say) Notepad and you can keep that around as long as you need it.

[wallewek]

Thanks Paul, I do that and also use screenshots in some cases.

I generally prefer text to videos, even though I'm sure you put a lot of work into them.  On your recommendation, I'll check that one out!

[wallewek]

Thanks for the video link, I checked out both of the track splitting videos.  Not much I didn't already know, but the alt key trick looks handy -- missed that in the help docs. 

One thing I've noticed is that when I use downloaded track info, the timings are usually quite close for side 1, but out to lunch on side 2.  Maybe I should delete the side break to make those fit better; I'll have to try the Alt key there as well.

Speaking of downloaded track info, is there any way to easily temporarily "revert" to downloaded timings to see how my manually edited tracks line up with them?  It would be extremely helpful to be able to pop open the "official" downloaded track list on a separate list while working.  Otherwise I need to navigate to Discogs again, maybe make a screenshot.  A lot of fuss with hundreds of albums.

But my biggest challenge is getting "Scan for track breaks" to detect track/end markers more accurately, even though it's very helpful.  Being picky, I've spent quite a bit of time tweaking the threshold settings -- they always seem to break too soon or too late.  That's why I was asking about vertical scale display on the track break screen.  And I was idly musing whether track break detection might benefit from a filter so it only looks at midrange frequencies. Just a thought.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

> is there any way to easily temporarily "revert" to downloaded timings to see how my manually edited tracks line up with them?

Yes, you can use Undo (and Redo).

We recommend using the Alt key trick for side 2.

I wouldn't worry about positioning the track break markers to the nearest millisecond.  It really doesn't matter, just get it so it sounds good.