I've talked to you before about free audio analyzers
that you can get so you don't have to immediately drop five hundred or a
thousand dollars on your software to get started you can get started with free
things that I've already talked about before like room EQ wizard or Rita from
educasound there's a new piece of software though that I'm just testing
out for the first time open sound meter and the reason why I want to demo it for
you today is that I really like its minimalist approach and it also is
really attempting to look like your other audio analyzers like you're Smaart
and your SATlive it has all the kind of modules you expect we're looking at the
RTA it also has magnitude phase and impulse you'll notice there's very few
controls here so no menus on the top to get access to anything you have to click
on something first and then you can change it so right now we're looking at
the RTA display and I could change this to bars so this probably looks familiar
to you after playing with it for just thirty minutes today my conclusion is
that I think it is a great entry-level piece of software especially for the
price of free now it has a handful of limitations that I want to expose you to
so you understand it and I think if you just know about the limitations you can
use it and actually get some good work out of it first limitation is that the
minimum here with this y offset scale is negative 90 now if we were looking at
this in smart I'd be able to scroll down even farther and if I change this back
to line this will make more sense so see we can't even see this information down
here just good to know that I could adjust the levels here coming in and
probably change that offset and be able to see the entire graph let's take a
look at the transfer function so I switch this to double and if you want to
know this is what triple looks like and then I can set these to whatever I want
so here is the auto set delay as you would expect and here I'm just measuring
an EQ
this is kind of what you expect right you've got magnitude up here in the top
phase down here in the bottom you may notice that there's some jumping around
down here this is probably the biggest problem I have with this audio analyzer
software so far you just this bothers me I don't know why you can never get this
stable I'll show you what happens when I try to get it stable but you could never
quite get this stable even when I'm measuring something so stable as just
any Q over here if I turn up the averages let's say I turn them up to 50
okay it gets a little bit more stable but still jumping around a little bit so
if you want to use the software just be aware this little limitation and you
know you're gonna have to kind of look at the trend here and not these little
things jumping around it might be a good idea to you know store a couple of
things and then you can see you know do some optical averaging here just with
your eye okay let me make these go away and let me turn this up to maximum
averages now so even at a hundred averages the maximum setting actually
it's gotten a lot better now okay see that's still changing a little bit but
notice where we only have a problem down here like around 50 Hertz so if you're
measuring doing a lot of measuring of subwoofers this may be a problem for you
but for the vast majority of the frequency spectrum here it's really
stable so let me show you what happens though when I try to get even more
definition here instability so if I change this they FFT size to its maximum
setting Wow look at that it starts freaking out these these meters here go
way off so I have to turn this down or it's going to crash so I'll set this
back to 10 this back to 14 the meters go back to normal
everything's okay let me show you what's happening here okay grant it ScreenFlow
is taking a lot of the CPU right now but watch the open sound meter as I turn
this stuff up so if I go from 10 to 100 averages
then go from 14 well let's just watch the open centimeter for a second but
it's really this FFT size that's making a huge change and I guess how much
processing it has to do and my my computer just can't handle it
look at that open sound meter goes up to 88% okay
so then I have to turn it back down so that is the reason for I guess some of
these limitations it also doesn't have ntw which i think would help with some
of this in MTW is an option for the FFT size in your audio and others analyzers
like smart and Sat live probably will be incorporated into open sound meter in
the future I assume let me show you what was one
more thing I was gonna do oh yeah I was gonna change these inputs to instead of
just measuring an EQ now I'm measuring a real speaker but really close just like
a meter away from the speaker's a recording so this has gone all crazy so
obviously I need to auto apply estimated delay here's the last problem I'll tell
you about I don't know what's going on with these lines jumping around here
okay so this bothers me and if I set this averaging up to something higher
and if I change the resolution here to maybe even higher higher than I really
need it to be and if I change the FFT size to
something slightly higher it's not so bad but they're still there just notice
that you can still use this you'll just kind of have to look at the trend here
of the face and kind of ignore whatever these things are jumping around
I'll hit store and then turn off the live measurement now I'm not looking at
those things jumping around okay so that's probably a safer way to use this
software so I'll turn that back on the live trace I'll store a couple more now
I'll just look at these all together now I can kind of look at the trend going on
here and kind of ignore this extraneous stuff right
open sound meter I'll put a link to it below this video you're not gonna find
it if you google it you will find it if you search for it in Facebook it is
right now a free piece of software so I recommend you test it out and the guy
was making it is just taking donations through PayPal so you might throw him a
few bucks he's got a link on the webpage there but let me know what you guys
think maybe you see something I'm not doing maybe I'm using it improperly and
that's why I'm getting these strange artifacts in the graph anyway I think
this is one of now several great options we have for free audio analyzers to get
you started