Here is an overview of various toolbars. Hover the mouse pointer over each section to get more information.
This determines the current range of the piano keyboard and the frequency range that is displayed in the analyzer view. You can enter the range as notes or as frequencies.
This switches between the linear and logarithmic display of frequencies. The linear mode corresponds to how a physicist might look at frequencies. In this mode consecutive overtones always have the same distance, but the piano keys become wider as the frequency increases. In the logarithmic scale mode, all piano keys have the same size. This represents how the ear interprets frequencies. In this mode, consecutive octaves (and other intervals) always have the same distance, but the overtones become spaced more closely as the frequency increases.
This allows to choose the horizontal or vertical display orientation. For spectograms the vertical orientation is probably more familiar (time flows from left to right, frequencies ascend vertically). For spectrums, the horizontal orientation is sometimes more useful because it shows the piano keyboard horizontally which makes the tones easier to identify.
This will play tones that have been selected with Ctrl-Click on the piano keyboard or the overtone sliders. Some instruments (such as the Piano) will decay by themselves, while others (such as the flute) will continue to sound until Stop playing selected tones is pressed.
Here you can select the number of overtone sliders shown. You can also choose to display the slider labels with note names, frequencies, or both. Slider transparency can be useful when many sliders are active and the spectrogram underneath is obscured. Snap to tempered tones will always snap the currently moved slider to the nearest tempered tone. With this option disabled, sliders can be moved around freely. Holding the Alt key while moving sliders will reverse the snapping behaviour temporarily.
These buttons allow to change the Analyzer View to display the spectrum, the spectrogram, both, or neither (which can be useful to work with overtone sliders alone).
This opens the Options Dialog. You can also use the function keys F2-F7 to directly open the most frequently used options pages.
The Zoom buttons allow you to zoom in, out, and to fit the displayed range to the current selection.
These buttons tile the windows on top of each other or next to each other. The maximize button will maximize the active window again.
This slider determines the input volume of the selected recording source. The same slider can also be found on the Audio Settings Dialog.
The colored bar in the background is the current volume of the incoming recorded data. It is very important to monitor this control and adjust the input volume to prevent the recording from being too loud, as this will cause artefacts in the spectrogram.
You can right-click on the level meter to disable or enable monitoring.
This slider adjusts the top level (or saturation value) of the displayed dynamic range. In the displayed spectrogram or spectrum, all values with an intensity above the value of this slider will be displayed as maximum intensity.
This slider adjusts the decibel range (also called dynamic range) of the displayed spectrogram or spectrum. When moving the slider, the view is updated in real time (depending on the speed of your computer). The same slider can also be found in Options / Analyzer Display / Color Scheme.
Changing this slider affects the amount of detail that you can see in the spectrogram and requires a little bit of experimentation for the specific sounds that you want to visualize.
