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Basic Operation

The program has three distinct operating Modes and five separate Views.  

Modes
  • Real-Time mode takes the audio directly off of the sound card, processes it and displays the results.  You can run for an indefinite period of time but the last 60 seconds (user adjustable) will be buffered. If you stop the analyzer and change to the Recorder or Post Processing mode you will be given a chance to save this data buffer to a wave file.  
  • Recorder mode allows you to save the raw digitized audio to your hard disk in the form of a .WAV file.  You can also playback the audio through the speaker connected to your sound card.  
  • Post-Processing mode allows you to process audio data which was previously recorded and stored on disk in a .WAV file.  This mode allows greater flexibility than the Recorder or Real-Time modes in the analysis process.  In particular, this mode allows the use of overlap processing to effectively stretch the time resolution in both the Spectrogram and 3-D Surface plots.

    Views
  • The Time Series view shows the digitized audio waveform.  It is similar to an oscilloscope display (amplitude versus time).
  • The Spectrum view displays the amplitude of the signal versus frequency.
  • The Phase view displays the phase of the signal versus frequency.
  • The Spectrogram view displays the spectra over time.  The amplitude is shown in color or grayscale.
  • The 3-D Surface view displays a perspective of the spectra over time.

    See also:  Setting up the Analyzer