Archive for category: Release Notes

New Features

This release focuses mainly on stability, performance, and usability. The most significant new feature is the possibility to set an upper frequency limit on the pitch detection, which makes the pitch detection much more useful for working with speech. Also, there are new presets for the Analyzer Settings to toggle between working with singing, speech, and instruments.
Another important new feature is crash recovery. This will restore all unsaved recordings after a power failure, system crash, or other unplanned program exit.
On Windows, the default audio driver is now WASAPI, which offers much smoother scrolling during recording than DirectSound.

• recovery of last recording after a crash or power failure
• set highest detected pitch for better analysis of speech
• profile support for Analyzer Settings, with presets for singing, speech, and instruments
• Options/Preferences dialog is now modeless, so the app can be used while the options windows is open
• Preferences dialog layout has been overhauled for macOS to be more compact and use less screen space
• on Windows, WASAPI is now the default recording system for reduced latency and smoother scrolling during recording
• Sound Generator can generate click tracks
• Sound Generator can generate custom melodies
• profile manager shows list of existing categories, for better organization of long profile lists
• detect Windows Sleep mode to stop recording when laptop gues to sleep to prevent power drain
• improved diagnostic output in log file
• Manage License dialog links to license page to allow resetting the activation counter
• update Windows installer to use latest dependencies

Fixes

• show mean pitch analysis even when vibrato is not enabled
• enable spectrum when pitch analysis is enabled
• fix LTAS line color for colormaps with white background
• improve saving dock window layout (Vowel Chart, File/Marker List, Analysis View)
• fix context menus getting stuck
• fix crash when using OpenGL software renderer for better compatibility on old systems
• improved detection of changing USB devices
• improved support for High-DPI screens
• fix flicker on macOS when preferences dialog is opened
• fix crash when entering extreme frequency ranges
• fix crash when app window is too small
• fix potential crash when using filters with multiple views

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