Vertical Bar/Line FFT/Spectrum Display- Feasible?

[Perfect Human Interface]

The old version first draws the background color and than draw the bar color gradients, where the y value sets alpha.
New version with transparency support does not draw background. Instead it uses y values to interpolate between back and foreground color.
I've kept the old version too, because it's lighter on CPU.

Cool. I thought that might be how the original worked but of course found otherwise. The only real benefit to this that I can think of would be you could set the "background" color to solid and then the "bar" color to full transparency so you have an inverted display (and background images could show through). Which is totally the kind of thing that I would try but may not be useful to many. So if the original is lower on CPU best to keep that definitely.

For changing the log scale, would you simply create a for loop in Ruby and apply the math for each index? Should be real easy right? Not at the workstation right now but I will give it a shot later.

[KG_is_back]

Cool. I thought that might be how the original worked but of course found otherwise. The only real benefit to this that I can think of would be you could set the "background" color to solid and then the "bar" color to full transparency so you have an inverted display (and background images could show through). Which is totally the kind of thing that I would try but may not be useful to many. So if the original is lower on CPU best to keep that definitely.

For changing the log scale, would you simply create a for loop in Ruby and apply the math for each index? Should be real easy right? Not at the workstation right now but I will give it a shot later.

What I was thinking of...cool thing would be if the background and foreground can be a bitmap and the gradients would apply transparency mask to the foreground. I have no Idea how that'd be done in FS though...

[Perfect Human Interface]

Lots and lots of drawing, maybe even per-pixel. On a related note, I've often thought it would be cool to have different blending modes like you get in Photoshop. Although all this fancy GUI stuff won't make your plugins sound better... Actually, I take that back. The mind is influenced by many things.

Even just transparent png overlays can do great things for GUI designs if you know how to work them though. The dynamics processor plugin I made turned out kind of neat. And things like this look great in motion.

DrumSploder.PNG (155.59 KiB) Viewed 13652 times

[KG_is_back]

Although all this fancy GUI stuff won't make your plugins sound better... Actually, I take that back. The mind is influenced by many things.

They do. Mainly because it is a graphical USER INTERFACE! Imagine you'd be tipping in attack coefficients for your compressor in as binary float... isn't a clearly named and properly scaled knob much better? Sure, you should be making music/mixing with your ears, not eyes, BUT your ears generally can't navigate you to equalizers knobs on your guitar amp, especially while listening to your actual tone.

There was an buoying 747 which crashed, because it had new digital readouts instead of classic "hand on a watch" type of readouts. Pilot was unfamiliar with the interface, didn't trusted those high tech machines and the plain crashed because of ridiculous malfunction of hydraulics (one that the pilot would normally be easily able to compensate).

[Perfect Human Interface]

Hahaha, ok, I get it. But come on. I was talking about blending modes. You don't need color blending modes and semi-transparent overlays to make a clear layout with knobs that turn and labels that give a precise value. But the reason I started this thread in the first place is because I needed something that provided a certain visual feedback that was intuitive and appropriate for precise filtering, so, of course, you are correct.

[KG_is_back]

Hahaha, ok, I get it. But come on. I was talking about blending modes. You don't need color blending modes and semi-transparent overlays to make a clear layout with knobs that turn and labels that give a precise value. But the reason I started this thread in the first place is because I needed something that provided a certain visual feedback that was intuitive and appropriate for precise filtering, so, of course, you are correct.

Sure, I'm also not a big fan of overly complicated and detailed GUI. My personal philosophy in plugins is that digital is digital, so why make it look like analog... My favorite GUI element is a label with horizontal/vertical drag ability, and edit box when double clicked - Simple, straightforward and very practical (mouse wheel support would be even one step cooler). But that is a matter of preference and sometimes even situation.

[Perfect Human Interface]

Ok, tried to convert to log base 2 via Ruby. Scaling came out all wacky. Any ideas?

Edit: Tried 2^x-1, still not linear in regards to notes/octaves.

[tulamide]

Ok, tried to convert to log base 2 via Ruby. Scaling came out all wacky. Any ideas?

When calculating the log of a number, no matter the base, avoid 0, because it is defined as infinity (-1.#INF). So instead of "if @Array[i] >= 0" it should be "if @Array[i] > 0". Also, ruby has convenience functions for base 10 and base 2, "Math.log10(x)" and "Math.log2(x)".

EDIT: And if you want a green solution, just use log2(x) = log10(x)/log10(2)

[Perfect Human Interface]

lol right, that was just a stupid error (I'm past my bedtime here). At first I had != 0 but then changed it to >=0 instead of just > 0 as I intended. Thanks for pointing it out.

I know there's log2 in Ruby but I wanted to make something that was flexible for future use.

Still can't figure out how to scale this thing to octaves. Feel dumb. Going to bed.

[tulamide]

I never tried it, but maybe this helps? http://www.daqarta.com/dw_0moo.htm