Some suggestions, enhancements for Acoustica – Acon Digital Forum

I have a few ideas for Acoustica. Since they’re mostly minor/niche, I’ll just post them all here.

1. Signal Generator: make the highest frequency audio format dependent
Currently the highest tone you can generate is always 24kHz, no matter if, for example, the audio format is 96kHz or 32kHz. It would make more sense to change the limit based on the sample rate of the audio format that you choose in the first step (so 48kHz and 16kHz in my example).

2. Decode MP3 (and other lossy formats) as 32bit float
Currently Acoustica loads MP3s as 16bit files and truncates the lower bits. This shouldn’t be audible or relevant for most material (most MP3s are probably from 16bit sources anyway), but I don’t see a significant downside to decoding them as 32bit float, just in case there’s some useful content there, or for people doing tests.

3. Define the format for a new recording
Currently, a new recording comes with “Format not defined”. This can be a problem if, for example, you want to paste individual channels into an empty multi-channel recording. I had to do this recently for a 5.1 track, but it applies to stereo and other formats too.
To get an empty usable 5.1 channel recording right now you need to do something like this:
1. Insert Silence
2. Select the Audio Format
3. Cancel the dialog for silence duration
4. Paste something in the new (5.1) recording
5. Undo what you pasted
So, it’s a bit cumbersome and most people probably wouldn’t know how to do it. Unless there’s an easier way that I missed, of course.
It would be nice if you could just define the format on a new recording instead. Maybe the “Convert Sample Format…” option could be enabled for non-defined recordings (and renamed to “Set/Convert Sample Format…”).

4. Time Stretch with pitch change
Currently, Time Stretch doesn’t let you change the pitch. But changing the pitch would be very useful in some cases. For example, it’s standard or at least very common to increase the pitch when converting DVD movies from NTSC to PAL (~24 to 25 fps). So to get it back to the original state, you need to both stretch it and lower the pitch. The “Transpose…” option in Acoustica does let you change pitch, but it doesn’t have the same fine percentage settings and movies presets as the “Time Stretch…” option.

5. Delete session files (after closing Acoustica)
I noticed that there are old Acoustica session files in the Users Documents folder, which I didn’t expect since I didn’t save them. I don’t know if this is intended or a bug, but it would be nice to have at least the option for having those files deleted automatically.

6. Display more than one time format (Time Display enhancement)
I was doing some sample based editing and I wanted to see the time both in m/s/ms and in samples, but you can currently only show one time format at a time.
Now, you could put them both on the main window (below the waveform), but it might end up looking too messy.
But maybe it could be done in the Time Display analyzer. Currently, at least the way I have it set up, it’s one big display that only shows those single giant numbers. Perhaps you could make this analyzer customizable (just like some other analyzers) and let users add other time formats to it (with a bigger font for the first/main one).