Audio spectrum/waveform analyser

jimjam91

i've been looking for a program which has a spectrum analyser and something that can show the waveform and, if possible, the combination of frequencies in a complex waveform.

I was told to try audacity because it's a small and free program but i dont know if i can do these things with that program.
can anybody help me with this? Thanks for any help you can give me!

PaulBrewer

What do you intend using it for Jim ?

jimjam91

well, it's partially out of interest in what the music i make is made up of but mostly because i want to be able to actually see that sorts of sounds i use, so i can see what sort of frequencies work together in my music, and to make a mental referance for sounds and waveforms

i have reason 4 so if there was some sort of plug in i could use ith that, it's probably help a lot

Anima

I think you're kinda going down the wrong route really. You shouldn't rely too much on visual analysis etc because at the end of the day it doesnt matter what it looks like as long as it sounds good.

Reason 4 doesn't support 3rd party pluggins so you could try audacity or another DAW which supports VSTs etc.

shayleon

Nugen has some awesome stuff for this, very sensibly priced.
All the best.
Shay.

jimjam91

does fruity loops studio support VSTs? it's be a very rough guide, and for the seeing waveforms, i'd be using that to try synthesise other sounds and just to play with.

if fl doesn't work for VSTs, could anyone recomend others?

Norris-wf

You could try Reaper as your DAW (very cheap compared to some of the others) and try Bluecats frequency analyser which is free. Thats one option. bluecat is a vst plugin which will run in Reaper

studiorat

I use Audio Explorer for the Mac. You can only really get meaningful information analysing single instruments though. I was using it for checking synthesizer patches I was making up. Checking for odd and even harmonics on an FM synth etc.

I suppose you could run a Mix through it. It uses colour to illustrate intensity and time and frequency on the x/y axis.

SPEAR is another one but again Mac only. They work stand alone and print out sonograms. It would be hard to read in real time anyway.

I think the Windows guys were using Sonogram (Visable Speech). There were a few for Linux too.

Neurojazz

This is awesome - but 32bit platforms only - http://pagesperso-orange.fr/vb-audio/us/products/freq_analyzer/freqa.htm

kfoltman

There's this:

http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

But I think it's designed to assist in transcription, not in timbre analysis.

However, I think Anima is mostly right about visual inspection being a dead end. You can try doing tuned spectrograms on single notes, but it's not very helpful.

studiorat

kfoltman wrote: »

There's this:

http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

But I think it's designed to assist in transcription, not in timbre analysis.

However, I think Anima is mostly right about visual inspection being a dead end. You can try doing tuned spectrograms on single notes, but it's not very helpful.

Oops that's the one...

if6was9

Voxengo span is a pretty good analysis plug in. Free too. It's a VST
It's good for seeing levels and the frequency spectrum. If I wanna see the waveform I just zoom in on it in my DAW.

jimjam91

i've just downloaded the demo version of reaper and tried to use reason as an instrument. i'm not perfectly clear as to how to do this. i've only just gotten comfortable using the instruments in reason so i'm a bit hesitant to abandon it for something else.can someone help me with that?

Norris-wf

I don't use reaper or reason, but I did find this: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=21712
Reaper is getting pretty big so there are quite a lot of tutorials popping up for it. This one looks like it might be what you want, although I cant say with certainty,
Best of luck with it

studiorat

Here's another. It's a VST based on FFT's. So you get a vocoder and all the rest of it too. Looks interesting...

http://free-plugin-list.com/plugin.php?id=281