Re: Spectral Editing is Not User Friendly

Hi Nikita,

Spectral Editing in Audacity is a fairly new, and not yet fully developed,
feature. Despite its shortcomings, it was considered to still be useful
enough to include in the Audacity release.

I like the idea of being able to export the spectrogram, edit in an image
editor, and then import back into Audacity. I presume that what you have in
mind is similar to the software "Photosounder" (http://photosounder.com/).
That would be a totally new feature, with only superficial similarity to
the current "spectral edit" feature.

The current feature is really a 'simulation' of editing the spectrogram,
rather than actually editing it. How it works is that the selected spectral
region sets two frequency parameters (high and low). Specially crafted
effects (the "Spectral" effects) can then use these parameters to control
their behaviour. The effects then process the audio data as would any other
audio effect. So the effect is not actually acting on the spectrogram - it
acts on the audio, and the spectrogram is updated from the processed audio.

Steve

On 6 October 2017 at 13:38, Nikita Sadkov <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi! It was an amazing discovery, that Audacity now supports spectral
> editing - arguably one of the most fundamental features, especially if
> you want to synth custom sfx for your project or edit some badly
> recorded material from https://freesound.org
>
> My complain is that it is very obscure and tedious to use in its
> current form. You have to separately enable spectral selection and use
> "Spectral edit ..." tools under "Effect" menu. I.e. you can't just
> press Del to clear the frequencies or use Draw Tool (F3) to paint your
> sfx with mouse.
>
> So I think it would make Audacity order of magnitude more useful, if
> it copies UI from Sony SpectraLayers, together with layers, which
> works just like a raster editor, but unfortunately lacks waveform
> editing capabilities. Also, it would be nice feature to export
> spectrum plot into png files, so people could edit it in GIMP and then
> import back into Audacity.
>
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*********** ASKING FOR HELP *************

When asking for help on this list, please include the following information, so we can
help you properly:

* What operating system you are using (for example, Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.5.1)

* Exactly what three digit version number of Audacity you are using (Help > About
   Audacity, or Audacity >  About Audacity on a Mac computer)

* If this is a recording problem, what equipment you are recording with, and how is it
   connected to the computer?

Mailing list: [email protected]
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