Introducing: The New Signal Generator Fly-Up Menu

Introducing: The Signal New Generator Fly-Up Menu

Since Smaart v9.3, the Signal Generator has undergone some visual and functional changes. Notably, it is now a fly-up menu designed to fit within the area of the Control Bar. This new compact interface allows the manipulation of generator settings with an unencumbered view of the data plots. 

To see this for yourself, you can use the [Alt] + [N] Hotkey or click Signal Generator on the Control Bar.

In addition to the signal type, outputs, level controls, and a generator On/Off button, this menu reveals a checkbox to set the interface to compact view, a checkbox to stop the generator once you’ve captured a trace, and an Output Config button.

If you enable Compact Signal Gen and can’t remember the hotkey to reopen this menu, don’t fret—you can find a third way to open the fly-up dialog under the Options menu. Otherwise, simply click on the textbox displaying the generator level. Smaart LE features the compact view, exclusively.

This menu has five stimulus types available for selection: Noise (formerly Pink Noise), Pink Sweep, Sine, File, and SMPTE (added in v9.5). Dual Sine, previously listed as its own stimulus option, is now listed under the settings for Sine, where it can be toggled via checkbox. 

The Noise stimulus type contains new options: Type, Contour, and a Band Limited checkbox with two sliders, all made available when using pseudorandom noise. Pink, Red, Pink-Red, and Speech Weighted contours are newly available selections, as well. A detailed discussion of each noise contour, both old and new, can be found here.

Noise also boasts a new setting, Output, which has three available options:

• Mono: When selected, the same noise seed is sent to each output that is enabled. This is the default selection for noise.
  
  
• Stereo: When selected, Smaart will generate two different noise seeds: one sent to all enabled odd-numbered output channels, and a second sent to all enabled even-numbered output channels. Note: It is absolutely necessary to use the same noise seed for both your loopback and your output. If you use two different noise seeds for a dual-channel measurement, you will be unable to produce any useful data.
  
  
• Multi (Multi-channel): This selection is disabled unless pseudorandom noise is selected. Each output enabled for use will have a unique noise seed. Using this setting, there is no limit to the number of channels that can have a unique output seed.

File now features a new user interface which allows you to queue multiple audio files for use as a test signal. Once you import your audio files via the Browse button, it operates similarly to most audio players. You can drag tracks to reorder them, use the corresponding "Next" and "Previous" buttons to navigate between them, and loop the currently selected track indefinitely using the "Repeat" button.

While the File option was previously mono-only, it now has an additional Output option: Stereo+. When selected in the Output dropdown, the Left and Right channels of a stereo file will be assigned to odd and even output selections, respectively. If the file contains more than 2 channels, then all channels are accommodated in the order they are presented. For instance, a 5.1 channel (FL/FR/Center/LFE/SL/SR) could be routed to outputs 1-6 in order, if they are selected.

Mono is still the default setting, but operates differently under the hood. Mono is now a sum of the Left and Right channels of a stereo file, not just the Left channel (as it was previously). Additionally, selecting File now automatically opens your file browser when there are no files previously loaded.

Smaart v9.5 marks the addition of a new signal selection: SMPTE. Selecting SMPTE will configure the signal generator to output a noise signal that corresponds to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers definition in the SMPTE ST 2095-1 draft. There are no user-definable settings for SMPTE noise.

SMPTE Noise has the following characteristics: