Questions & Answers

Spectral / Spectrogram Audio Events View ("peaks")

+46 votes
2,346 views
asked May 24, 2018 in Editing by diapasonprodues (2,560 points)

Hey so, a long time ago I once thought hey how nice would it be if we could switch from the waveform view of audio clips to a spectrogram view! But I though maybe in the future, because that sounds like really hard to implement and probably cpu heavy. But one year ago Reaper did it. I don't know if any other daw did it too. 

The importance of this is that waveform view only tells us amplitude and phase. With some audio material it gets pretty hard to spot the exact places where some artifact or event is happening. More importantly for editing music and specially for time correction, it can get pretty hard to tell with just the waveform where to make the cuts and where to align to the grid with some audio materials. Such as guitars for example. On the other hand, with a spectrogram it is really easy to spot with precision the exact time of the acoustic guitar strums and picks. Or exactly where in a certain note did some noise occur so we can try to fix that within the DAW before resorting to external editors such as RX.

PS. This is NOT a duplicate to other requests of a spectral EDITOR within Studio One. While some simple spectral editing could be nice I don't think it would match RX (or others) so I would probably not use it at all. The DAW is not the place for spectral editing in my opinion. I'm suggesting that a spectral VIEW of the audio events would help for much easier editing with the already existing editing tools.

PS2: Also not a duplicate of the other request asking for coloring the waveform depending on frequency analysis. I suggest the option to replace the waveform entirely with a spectrogram (or replace the background color of the item and overlay the waveform? I will leave design choices for the awesome team at presonus).

This is Reaper's Implementation: (Notice it's nice you can edit gain, frequency scale, color, etc. You can also have the same item display waveform and spectrogram, but it gets clumsy in my opinion. I leave it for Presonus' team to come up with their own implementation and make it nice!)

2 Answers

+8 votes
answered May 25, 2018 by AlexTinsley (925,070 points)
 
Best answer

Thank you for the feature request. 

If anyone else agrees or disagrees, please VOTE!

The developers pay close attention to those that are voted on the most. 

You are allowed one vote. You can change your vote later if you choose.

(Here's some helpful info on how to use the voting system)

Please vote the original question / feature request. 

Please DO NOT Vote on THIS response!

0 votes
answered Apr 7, 2023 by tarasmaterdey (260 points)
Yes, the spectral view option is a very nice and useful feature of Reaper and Adobe Audition. I'd like to see it in S1 as well.
...