Is it possible to view audio levels (in db) by moving cursor over a waveform?

Hi,
I recently use Cakewalk on a Windows 10 pc. One thing that was very useful at the time was that we could move the mouse pointer over the audio waveform graphic and a small flag would appear telling us the the audio level in db of the part of the audio we were pointing to.

I have just installed Ardour and I wondered if a similar function is available ?

Many Thanks,
Nick.

No I do not believe this exists. I assume you mean in dBFS for the source audio?

   Seablade

There is no such feature currently, although it would not be too hard to add it.
Could you elaborate how you find the momentary digital peak useful when editing?
What are you interested in? Overall peak of all channels? min/max range? investigate DC offset?

Meanwhile you could do a range selection and then from the context menu pick ā€œLoudness Analysisā€, or analyze the whole region.

1 Like

Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
We were mixing for a short film and were asked that volume could be kept between -6.0 & -12.0db. Thereā€™s no other reason for asking other than I found it was just handy at the time to ā€˜scrubā€™ along the wave form with the mouse pointer and see the ā€˜volume levelsā€™ of the audio.

Thanks again,
nictu.

So this is about the result, after mixing?
Are you interested in level of the master-bus output at a given time?

If so that wonā€™t work in Ardour. The waveform display in the editor is the raw audio as recorded without any processing or mixing. But you could normalize the result during export.

Or is this about tracking dialog on and atmo on on set?

Hello again,
No, I wasnā€™t interested in the master-bud output. As you say, ā€œThe waveform display in the editor is the raw audio as recorded without any processing or mixing.ā€ and this is the same in cakewalk on the pc and with cakewalk we could see a db reading for a given peak by moving the cursor (just the normal mouse pointer I think) over that waveform.
Itā€™s not really that important and doesnā€™t really matter if Ardour doesnā€™t do this. I just thought it was handy at the time.

Many Thanks though,
nictu.

1 Like

I did a quick prototype [1] for that, showing the peaks (max/min of all channels) of the raw audio in a waveform. When using the ā€œinternal editā€ tool: http://robin.linuxaudio.org/tmp/wavepeak.mp4

[1] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/commit/40ba798cb13bfcee2e0cc1b24516ef98ed4f866a

5 Likes

Wow, thanks Robin, that looks great, and very useful. Well done.
Iā€™m still not that familiar with Ardour, as I only installed it this week.
So, is the ā€˜Internal Edit Toolā€™ a device for adding code into the Ardour software?

nictu.

Yeah itā€™s a start, perhaps there should also be a line that displays the corresponding pixel, perhaps also the range (number of samples per pixel, or miliseconds per pixes).

Itā€™s the tool usually used to edit MIDI region contents or automation-lane data.
Other tools only perform edits of meta-data (regions, ranges, positions) without changing any underlying data.

I was looking into ways to not always display the level. When editing, the level display just gets in the way. It seemed appropriate to re-use the tool used to edit contents (internal edit) to also show contents (here signal level) of audio-data.

Perhaps we need a different way to toggle the display on/off that is independent of the tool, but we have to start somewhere.

No, that ā€œdeviceā€ would be me :slight_smile: Iā€™m one of the two main ardour developers.

3 Likes

These are the things that make the program fun to work with

Perhaps we need a different way to toggle the display on/off that is independent of the tool, but we have to start somewhere.

Iā€™d favour a modifier key (preferably user selectable).

1 Like

Weā€™re running out of modifiers :slight_smile:

The most sensible Iā€™ve found is to reuse the ā€œSnap overrideā€ modifier key (default on Windows + Linux: Alt, macOS: Control).

Since Ardour 6.5.66 the peak is always displayed in internal-edit mode. With other tools it is shown when the snap modifiers key is held, while moving the mouse over a region.

1 Like

Weā€™re running out of modifiers

I donā€™t see any modifiers assignable for when the mouse is just hovering.

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.