Archive for category: Release Notes

New Features:

Pitch Detection Sensitivity

The Analyzer Settings page now has two entries to determine the sensitivity of the pitch detection: Minimum Clarity and Minimum Intensity. The intensity is a threshold in dB. If the incoming audio is quieter than this, it is rejected, even if it has a valid pitch. The clarity threshold is a measure of confidence that the detected pitch is valid, regardless of the volume of the incoming audio. Together, these settings can filter out background noise when processing speech, and will work together to keep audio that contains a fundamental pitch that is loud and clear enough.

Draw unfiltered spectrum

When using filters, the original, unfiltered spectrum is drawn as an outline:

Automatically install updates

New versions can now be installed with the click of one button. This should make it more convenient to keep the software up to date.

Bugs fixed:

• Fix the line thickness of the zoomed waveform.
• Image export dialog might be included in the exported image under some conditions.
• Spectrum filtering could be stuck with showing the wrong content.
• “Apply filters permanently” did not correctly use filters with custom strength values.
• Loading and re-saving mp3 files did not work.
• Textual cursor info on spectrum had the wrong position when “note name” was not shown.

This release of VoceVista Video 5.4.0 has been cooking for almost a year and brings several major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes.
This release does not yet contain documentation for the new features. We will update the user manual and add new tutorial videos for everything in the coming weeks.

VoceVista Video Pro

Vibrato Analysis

The biggest new feature in VoceVista Video Pro 5.4 is Vibrato analysis. Vibrato is a periodic fluctuation of the fundamental pitch of a singer. The vibrato analysis feature can plot the vibrato rate and extent over time, and it can show a numeric readout of the instantaneous and average values of those parameters.
Here is a video tutorial for this feature:

EGG Wavegrams

The electroglottograph (EGG) display now officially supports the EGG Wavegrams developed by Dr. Christian Herbst. Similar to how the spectrogram can visualize how the spectrum changes over time, the EGG and dEGG Wavegrams visualize how the EGG and its derivative change over time, so that the entire history can be visalized in a single image.

Improved Long Term Average Spectrum

Various bugfixes and workflow improvements were made to showing the Long Term Average Spectrum.

Marker list improvements

The theming of the marker list has been revised to give a better visual grouping of a file and its markers. Also, the workflow for selecting and managing markers has been revised and improved.

All editions (VoceVista Video Pro, VoceVista Video, Overtone Analyzer)

Real-time pitch display during playback and recording

During recording and playback, the current pitch is now shown in real time, and the detected musical note can be shown on the piano and the staff view.

Improved accuracy when tracking pitch of singing voice

When singers put a strong emphasis on their higher harmonics, the pitch tracking might pick those harmonics as the fundamental pitch, because in a mathematical sense, they might be the strongest periodic component of the sound. With the new feature prefer harmonic fundamental, the pitch tracker will find the fundamental at the base of the harmonic series, even when the higher harmonics are very strong. This makes pitch tracking for singing much more robust.

Color pitch line by frequency

In addition to having a flat color for the pitch line, this line can now be colored by frequency. The colors will repeat for each octave. This can be enabled unter Preferences / Frequency Scale / Color by Frequency. Thanks to Heidi Moss for requesting this feature.

Improved Sound Generator

The Sound Generator now has much richer simulation options, including second-order modifiers to create dynamics, and to change speed and extent of vibrato over time.
In the picture above, the vibrato rate follows a bell curve to change smoothly from 2.5 Hz to 7.5 Hz and back, while the vibrato extent follows a linear curve from 100 to 50 cent.

More audio backend options

Under Preferences / Advances Settings / Audio Performance, you can now select a new audio backend (“Backend R”) for better compatibility on some MacBook models. On Windows, this will allow to record through the “ASIO” framework, which offers very low latency on high end sound cards.

Smooth colormap interpolation

So far, all colormaps have used linear interpolation between their control points. This may cause some sharp spikes, such as in the yellow part in the middle of the colormap above. With the new “Smooth” color interpolation method, the colors flow more naturally into each other without any spikes.

 Selection Period and Frequency

For selected time ranges that are shorter than one second, the inverse of the selected period is automatically displayed as frequency. This allows to verify the period and frequency of vibrato cycles, or even individual vocal fold vibrations.

Smaller changes

VVVP only

• check all and check none buttons on Profile manager, and other places
• require ALT key when moving markers on spectrogram
• support for multi-user installations and offline activations
• support for automated installations

VVVP and VVV

• improvements to Export Image dialog
• fix some bugs related to window tiling
• in Vowel Chart, disable snapping to resonance matrix when ALT is pressed
• open multiple files at once when using the “Open file” command

All editions (VVVP, VVV, OA)

• improved support for Retina displays
• new crash handler for better error diagnostics
• group secondary time scales to simplify the view menu and other places
• enhanced context menus for secondary views to show the name of the view and allow to hide it
• Preferences now have many shortcut buttons to directly change the color of certain display elements such as pitch and mean pitch lines
• listbox rows are themed with alternating colors
• fix some bugs with importing .m4a files and other compressed file types
• revise and rename included sample files
• fix alignment issues on status bar

Known issues

Saving as mp3

On macOS, the Save As dialog doesn’t show the choice of file extension by default. This is a glitch. To make the file type choice visible, for example if you want to save as .mp3, switch to another app and then back to VoceVista Video.

This is mostly a service update to fully support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

Known issues

• No recording on macOS 10.12 and 10.13: The changes made to support macOS Catalina turned out to be incompatible with older macOS versions. Please download the latest beta version from our support page.
• No pitch line if spectrogram is turned off. The pitch line will only be displayed if the spectrogram is enabled. To hide the spectrogram, you can adjust the brightness and contrast sliders to make it invisible. Fixed for Version 5.4.0

This update has taken much longer than originally planned because we had to change quite a lot of stuff under the hood to prepare the app to support the Electroglottograph (EGG) display. Most notably, all editions now have better support for stereo files and allow switching the displayed stereo channel on the fly.

This version also completes all features from Overtone Analyzer 4.0 that were still missing, such as the textual pitch and cursor info display on top of the spectrum.

This is a free update for all users of VoceVista Video / Overtone Analyzer 5.x. If you have a license for those programs, you can simply download the latest edition from our download page and install it over the old one.
To upgrade from the older Overtone Analyzer 4.0, please contact us for details about how to buy a renewal license.

Here are the individual changes:

New Features

• support for the Electroglottograph (EGG) in VoceVista Video Pro
• improved support for storing the contents of one window in another for comparison
• export recordings as mp3
• change stereo channel display on the fly
• frequency filters work in stereo now
• textual pitch and cursor info display on top of the spectrum:
  

Bug fixes / Detail improvements

There are a lot of fixes and improvements in this release, too many to list all of them. Here are some of the more important ones:

• better fading in and out (to avoid loud pops) when playing the selection in a loop, and while dragging the visible rectangle
• support for resizing the selection while looping, even when looping very short sections
• review workflow for creating Markers and using Marker List
• better support for horizontal spectrogram orientation
• better default file names
• refresh tabs more consistently when file names have changed
• fix various crashes
• fix file corruption when opening wave files with unknown chunks
• support for macOS 10.13
• fix various scaling issues for retina screens
• make more colors adjustable in the Fonts and Colors settings (such as LTAS line)