Re: [Audacity-quality] Linear vs dB

[Peter S. <pet...@gm...>]

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 1:37 PM, Steve the Fiddle <ste...@gm...>
wrote:

> On 5 April 2017 at 10:41, Peter Sampson <pet...@gm...>
> wrote:
> > There is some advantage in having default linear waveform and dB meters.
> >
> > 1) The linear waveform  shows more "detail" to the user and looks more
> > meaningful (whether it is real "detail" or not is debatable).
> > It just "looks better" in Linear mode.
>
> You're confusing scaling with labelling.
>
> It's very common (normal) in other applications to display linear
> scaled waveform (so that a sine wave looks like a sine wave) with the
> vertical axis labelled in dB. Thus the centre line is -inf, the top
> and bottom are 0, and half way between top/bottom and centre is -6.
>

ok - so I'm confused - I aways told you I was an audiot ;-))


>
> I'm not suggesting that we change the default scaling anywhere, just
> having a preference for which form of labelling to use (rather than a
> mishmash).
>
> Steve
>
> >
> > 2) With the meters set to Linear a perfectly decent, acceptable and
> workable
> > level of -6dB only shows up as 50% apparently giving half as much again
> > headroom - thereby encourouging users to crank it up  unnecessarily
> > over-saturating  their signal.
> >
> > Even with the meters set to -db it's still hard enough to encourage folk
> to
> > keep
> > the levels down.  You've only got to look at the myriad "tutorials" about
> > Audacity
> > uasge on Youtube to see that that is the case, most of them have
> waveforms
> > banging about at the extremes of plus 1 to minus 1.
> >
> > So I would be -1 on changing the default settings for waveform and meter
> > display.
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------------------
> >
> > I can see an argument for changing the Generators to be dB based.
> >
> > But is does make sense for me for the Gain slider to be in dB and the Pan
> > slider liner.  So I, personally, would not change that.
> >
> > Peter.
> >
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