Re: [Audacity-devel] Audacity feature suggestion - digital oscilloscope trigger function

[Richard A. <ri...@au...>]

On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 11:50 -0400, Timothy Marzullo wrote:
> My colleague Greg Gage and I founded "Backyard Brains" as a startup to
> deliver low cost neuroscience to high schools, universities, and
> amateur scientists by building tools to record from the nervous system
> of insects. 
> www.backyardbrains.com

> We have developed our own electronics, and we are using "Audacity" to
> view and record the data on labtops. This all works wonderfully on the
> PC and Mac, and we are currently trying to get it to work on the OLPC
> (re: previous discussions).

> You folks at Audacity have built a very powerful audio processing
> tool, but you have inadvertently (or maybe intentionally) also created
> a very valuable scientific tool! By accessing the microphone input of
> any standard labtop, we can feed almost any analog signal we want from
> any scientific instrument we build into your very easy to use and
> intuitive program (with a huge array of post-processing built in).
> And, If we need to, we simply save our data as wav files and then do
> any further post-processing in Matlab.

> The only thing Audacity needs to make it a killer scientific tool is a
> sort of "digital oscilloscope" mode with a trigger function. The
> youtube link below shows what neural data looks like in triggering
> mode.
> 
> To do this would be a modification of the viewing options in Audacity.
> I do not know how difficult this is, but I wanted to throw it out
> there. We have been attempting to modify other programs to do this,
> but Audacity is just  a much more mature program. Let me know what you
> think! We have a big demo in a couple months at the largest
> neuroscience meeting in the world, and we'll be sure to give
> shout-outs to Audacity as much as we can.

This kind of thing (using Audacity as an engine for non-audio data) has
been done before, notably a project for a digital stethoscope which used
Audacity as a waveform processor. It would certainly be possible to
provide the relevant functionality as an off-line process within
audacity (so you could take a recording, and run it through a scope-like
process retrospectively). There is already a sound-activated recording
feature available, which will start recording when a signal is detected,
which could be tuned as a scope-style trigger function, but creating a
continuous linear recording in Audacity.

That said, it the moment we are committed to a release cycle with will
see a new stable release out during this Autumn. So there will probably
be relatively little effort available until after this has happened.
Probably your best bet is to remind us of this conversation (and any
progress) after Audacity 2.0 has been released, when there will be more
effort available to develop the kind of customised extensions to
Audacity that would suit this kind of usage.

Richard