Comment by radiowave
6 years ago
Was really not expecting to be impressed by this, but it's excellent. The inclusion of a spectrogram is a very nice touch.
The ability to preview EQ changes while the audio is playing back is impresssive, although the x-axis scale on the parametric isn't helpful - everything below 1kHz is squashed into the left-most 10% of the plot.
Some small nitpicks are that it's currently quite fiddly to use the compressor without a gain reduction meter, and my usual bugbear with simpler audio editors: that fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve.
But the fact that this is working so smoothly in a browser at all, and in Firefox to boot, is really commendable.
It also has my usual bugbear in that fades are calculated linearly rather than logarithmically as humans actually perceive loudness. (Decibels are logarithmic for a reason.)
How come so many apps get this wrong? This is really basic psychoacoustics, and linear fades sound terrible!
> fade-outs are almost never useful unless you can alter the curve.
I agree, but would like to add that you should be altering a logarithmic curve.
You are 100% correct. I guess it's because it's a js developer doing audio, instead of an audio engineer doing js! So I have a lot to learn, most of the plugins have minor issues, but I 'll be focusing in correcting those when I get the chance!
I agree with the above posters. Things like normalize as well should also probably have their value expressed as dB as that's kind of the industry norm from what I understand.
I do have to say, this is a super cool tool and I've definitely bookmarked it. I normally use tools like Audacity to quickly record, trim, and normalize audio tracks so this tool fits my use cases very well. Thanks for sharing!
You're in good company! There are countless linear loudness controls out there. My "favorite" from years ago was Logic Audio. Hopefully they fixed it a long time ago.
> The ability to preview EQ changes while the audio is playing back is impresssive
Comments like this surprise me, but probably because the lightest weight thing I'll spin up for audio work is Reaper.
The idea of anything but online rendering for user controlled DSP wouldn't cross my mind - it always aggravates me when I have to do it (there's a few older tools I use where it's the only way to do things like time/pitch edits).
> everything below 1kHz is squashed into the left-most 10% of the plot
Very specifically you want a semilog plot (use center bin frequency, not edge of the bin to avoid the 0 problem) or if you're really fancy, constant-Q/mel/bark scales. Grid should be Frequency = [(1:9)e(1:3),10e3 20e3], Magnitude = [-96:6:0].
Very helpful if you use an exponential average on the bins for meter ballistics.
What was notable to me about the live preview is that a browser-based tool was able to do it convincingly - not that it's an impressive feature per se.
It's quite impressive. Dare I have the audacity to say it rivals Audacity?