DeltaWave null-testing audio comparator (beta)

[pkane2001]

1 minute ago, fas42 said:

Naughty Paul ... not keeping us up to date on latest offerings ... 😈

 

Has got himself a fan base on that forum that shall not be named - what's the world coming to !? 🤪

 

 

But seriously, lots of good input from members there - and DW keeps getting better, 😉.

 

Sorry, Frank, just updated to 1.0.58 earlier today, and didn't yet get a chance to post here :)

 

[pkane2001]

Based on a lot of good feedback, DeltaWave version 1.0.58 is now available.

Changes in 1.0.58b

• Added: Separate setting for sub-sample alignment, independent of drift correction
• Added: Additional values for phase and non-linear threshold in settings
• Changed: setting changes are saved immediately when exiting settings window, not when exiting DeltaWave as before
• Fixed: group-delay/phase trend plot should produce a better curve fit to the phase plot
• Fixed: phase limit setting now works as expected, was ignored previously
• Added: (experimental) 400ms window filtered error signal in PK Metric plot. Hold down Ctrl key while mousing over the main plot to update.
• Fixed: File end trim/take settings are now enforced up to the sample. Previously could vary based on file buffer size.

 

Subsample setting (default=checked):

 

If Correct clock drift is selected, the subsample alignment will be performed regardless of whether Subsample offset option is selected. Unselecting both, will not correct for clock drift and leave sample alignment up to +/- 1 sample.

[pkane2001]

DeltaWave version 1.0.59 is now available.

Changes primarily related to using simple/periodic waveforms for loopback analysis:

• Fixed: corrected sub-sample matching behavior of simple/periodic waveforms (regression from .58)
• Added: Automatic trim of silence at both ends of a file when using Auto-Trim option
• Added: Automatic detection of simple/periodic waveforms. If simple waveforms option is not on, user will be asked to turn it on
• Changed: Improved THD+N measurements for simple (single frequency) waveforms
• Fixed: dB display in THD frequency plot for simple waveforms – used to display in scientific notation the first time it’s used

Here's an example of a simple waveform measurement (1kHz sine-wave) showing harmonics and their amplitude recorded with RME ADI-2 Pro:

 

[fas42]

Aiming to be the SpaceX of software, Paul ... churning them out fast, when the boiler is stoked? 😉

[pkane2001]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

Aiming to be the SpaceX of software, Paul ... churning them out fast, when the boiler is stoked? 😉

In this release just fixing things that have been pending for a while related to simple waveforms. Nothing earth shattering ;)

[TomCapraro]

Hi Paul, the latest version is interesting ... but using my reference files a worse result of at least 20dB is produced
This using the same settings.

[pkane2001]

22 minutes ago, TomCapraro said:

Hi Paul, the latest version is interesting ... but using my reference files a worse result of at least 20dB is produced
This using the same settings.

Hi Tom,

 

Can you please share the files and your settings?

[TomCapraro]

Here is Paul, I also posted the files. With the same settings in previous versions I get a spectrum delta of -140dB on average

 

 

White_PN_64k_20_20000_96.0k_Float_LR.wav rec 1.wav

[pkane2001]

On 2/5/2021 at 11:39 AM, TomCapraro said:

Here is Paul, I also posted the files. With the same settings in previous versions I get a spectrum delta of -140dB on average

 

 

White_PN_64k_20_20000_96.0k_Float_LR.wav 15 MB · 2 downloads rec 1.wav 7.78 MB · 2 downloads

 

Hi Tom,

 

Looking at the changes, it appears the difference is caused by the updated trimming function. I'm not sure why it's causing such a large difference, but when I remove the automatic trim, the spectrum of delta goes to below -140dB, so it is related to what's removed. I may have to rework the trimming function (again!) to make it more intelligent. For now it simply removes anything close to silence from both waveforms before processing, and that seems to cause this problem.

[TomCapraro]

There is a problem because even removing the automatic trim function the results of the previous versions are not achieved.
I use these files as a reference, and when all goes well they must produce a delta of around -140dB ... and without any "rise" of the high frequency noise.

[TomCapraro]

Version 1.0.50b, this is the correct delta.

[pkane2001]

On 2/8/2021 at 2:54 PM, TomCapraro said:

Version 1.0.50b, this is the correct delta.

 

Hi Tom,

 

Can you please try version 1.0.61? I've made some changes to how the trimming of silence data is done, and I believe it's working better, but I'm not sure the result matches 1.0.50 exactly. Probably because the number of samples that it trims is slightly different.

 

The temporary link to download the new version:  https://deltaw.org/DeltaWaveSetup61.zip

 

Here's the delta I get with this version and your test files:

 

[TomCapraro]

From my point of view and ... according to my references it's excellent ... !!!

[TomCapraro]

I compared the delta between the original digital file and the recording (in orange) versus the repeat recording twice (in blue)
In practice, they are almost the same.
I don't think there is any room for improvement.

[pkane2001]

For those interested in how DeltaWave does on Gearslutz AD/DA loopback data, I've assembled some of the data from that thread and processed it through DeltaWave. The results are here: https://deltaw.org/gearslutz.html

 

Here's a sample top of the list ordered by increasing PK Error metric:

 

 

 

[pkane2001]

DeltaWave v1.0.62 is now available. I'll document the changes in more detail later, but most should be obvious:

Changes in 1.0.62b

• Added: Configuration selection in Setup window, along with reset and save options
• Added: Command-line arguments to automatically process files and write out the result
• Added: Set Trim levels to current Zoom level menu under Edit menu 
• Added: Play zoomed-in portion of wave file menu under Play menu 
• Added: PK Metric column and optimization option to Manual Adjustments window 
• Added: Option to display and enter gain settings in DB in Manual Adjustments window 
• Added: Right click pop-up menu for showing/hiding tabs (right-click on any visible tab)
• Added: Linearity measurement at 0.5dB error (in bits)
• Added: Check/uncheck button to select or unselect all tabs in the Setup window
• Changed: Manual Adjustments window will now apply new file trim settings, if changed 
• Changed: Frequency axis log scale labels should work better with high-resolution displays, previously could cause overlaps
• Changed: sub-sample offset calculation to work better with noise signals 
• Changed: zero value in “Take” trim level will now result in taking samples to the end of the file, just like it does with “End” setting. Previously resulted in error message

[pkane2001]

Updated version 1.0.63 addresses a few issues reported in .62:

• Fix: Settings window toolbar can overlap text below under certain DPI settings
• Fix: Exception and stop processing when linearity plot contains too few samples in the lower few bits
• Fix: When subsample correction is enabled but drift correction is turned off, small delays below 1/1000000 of a sample might still be processed and applied, unnecessarily. These were properly ignored when drift correction was enabled

[pkane2001]

I know... it's yet another release... v1.0.64 

The two notable changes are:

• Change: Added a View->Chart Options->Linearity index to 0 menu option to turn on/off linearity plot normalization (on by default)
• Added: FFT Scrubber processing and plot window with audio scrubbing

The second change is a way to view spectrum details using a scrubber control and short FFTs over time. This is almost like an unrolled spectrogram, except in 2-D, where you control which time interval you want to view. You can see only one interval at a time:

 

With the Signal control you can chose which Spectrum display you want to view: Reference & Comparison, Delta of Spectra or Spectrum of Delta.

Use the scrub control at the bottom by dragging the round ball across the time line (shown in seconds) or click anywhere on the control to jump to the desired time. The chart will update in real-time as you drag it around, and, of course you can zoom in or out and reposition the plot, as you can with all other plots in DeltaWave.

At the top, you can chose to play the sound of either Reference or Comparison waveforms whenever a new time interval is selected. Currently it will play for 1 second and stop, starting at the position where the chart starts as soon as you drag or click on a new scrub position. This is to give you an idea what part of the track the time interval represents.

The position display at the top shows the exact start of the interval used to compute the spectrum plot.

The FFT size for this chart is controlled by the spectrogram FFT setting (256 to 64k).

This is work in progress. I'm very open to suggestions on how to improve this view and whether it is useful. The reason I wanted to see the spectra this way is because the other spectrum plots in DW represent an average of frequencies across the entire track, which may hide some large but fast errors by averaging them out. Because the FFT Scrubber uses a short-time FFT plot (STFFT) some of the transient differences may be easier to catch.

 

[pkane2001]

There were a few DeltaWave updates since the last post. Versions and their corresponding changes:

Changes in 1.0.67b

• Fixed: upsampling caused an index out of range error under certain conditions
• Added: FFT Scrub plot will now update automatically in sync with playing music
• Added: A few new sizes of Tukey FFT Windows
• Added: Import of IR WAV-format files

Changes in 1.0.66b

• Fixed: matching of files smaller than FFT Size (caused an error previously)
• Changed: units labeled “V” changed “Amplitude” in IR plot viewer to better reflect value from -1 to 1
• Changed: IR plots are now interpolated
• Fixed: Plot refresh button now refreshes IR plot

Changes in 1.0.65b

• Added: Impulse Response averaging, correction, and export
• Added: Impulse Response plot with selectable units
• Added: Frequency response file exports in REW text format
• Changed: Reorganized File menu
• Added: In FFT Scrub control, hold down Control key while using mouse wheel to accelerate scrubbing by 50x
• Changed: selected zoom levels per chart are now saved with the settings and will be in effect next time DeltaWave is started
• Changed: added option to save/reload custom zoom settings for all plot windows
• Changed: Small adjustment in gain difference computation for improved accuracy
• Added: FFT Scrubber now displays RMS values of the three signals (Ref, Comp, Delta)

 

 

[fas42]

Hello, Paul ...

 

Haven't touched DW in a while - updated to this; and next step tried Load Only of last files that were compared ... trouble was, it went into a Compare. Stopped it, tried again - and still insisted on doing a Compare - this ended up bogging down the laptop in the Updating Charts step ... took ages to break the m/c out of the deadly, braindead Windows death spiral; where nothing you do gets you out of the quicksand ...

[pkane2001]

Version 1.0.69b of DeltaWave is now available:

Changes in 1.0.69b

• Added: minimum phase filters can now be used in addition to linear phase ones
• Changed: Improved group delay plot to more closely match phase variations
• Changed: Cepstrum plot to use time (quefrency) scale on the X-axis, changed annotations to show frequency and period

Minimum phase filters can be selected in settings:

Cepstrum plot can be used to find echos, as well as reflections/reverb in a recording. For example, an echo at 0.5sec added using Audacity to a music file is easy to spot:

 

And here are the reverb/reflections in an un-manipulated music recording:

 

 

 

[pkane2001]

New version of DeltaWave 1.0.70 is now available.

Changes in 1.0.70b

• Added: support for log-frequency display in spectrograms
• Fixed: the name of FFT window: Tukey0.01 was misspelled

 

Spectrogram log frequency display is controlled by the same Log Axis option as before:

 

 

[pkane2001]

I'm pleased to announce that DeltaWave is now officially grown up and out of the beta test!

Release 2.0 celebrates this with a few additions and improvements:

Changes in v2.0.0

• This is the first official release without the “beta” designation (!)
• Added: fully functional version of the log-frequency spectrogram
• Changed: improved speed of update on spectrogram plots
• Added: additional menu options to hide/show multiple tabs on right click on a tab
• Improved: accuracy of the Sinc resampler
• Improved: accuracy of the subsample offset determination
• Improved: made charts update quicker during a match operation
• Fix: minor clean up to additional edge condition handling
• Added: new resampler rates, 352.8k, 384k, 705.6k and 768k
• Added: the full list of FFT Windows to all drop-downs on the Setup screen

While DeltaWave is no longer in a beta test, the software is still being enhanced and updated, and new features will be added when suggested or as I think of them.

[fas42]

Paul, has been awhile since I've used DW in anger - and a minor thing with 2.0 is that the vertical axis in Aligned ( or Original??) Waveforms didn't respect the dB toggle when first run - had to switch it off, and then on, to get it to sync to the setting.

 

But the biggy is that the Delta Spectrogram is completely out of sorts - not showing any detail. To confirm that something was very askew, I went back to 63b - and the display for the same audio files being compared was fine ...

[pkane2001]

6 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Paul, has been awhile since I've used DW in anger - and a minor thing with 2.0 is that the vertical axis in Aligned ( or Original??) Waveforms didn't respect the dB toggle when first run - had to switch it off, and then on, to get it to sync to the setting.

 

But the biggy is that the Delta Spectrogram is completely out of sorts - not showing any detail. To confirm that something was very askew, I went back to 63b - and the display for the same audio files being compared was fine ...

 

Hi Frank,

 

Yes, the delta spectrogram was scaled incorrectly in that version. I found the issue and fixed it, but have other things I was waiting to finish before publishing an update. I'll try to get this out ASAP.