Today I unleashed FuzzMeasure 3.1 on the world, and I’m pretty excited about it. Actually, relieved is probably a more accurate term.

You can read the FuzzMeasure 3.1 Press Release for further details, etc.

Now I can return to the other projects I’m working on again, and get working on the first of the new features of 3.2…

…though I’m not going to tell you where it is. I’ll let @fuzzmeasure do it for me via Twitter.

I am not happy about the recent flood of announcements for beta builds on this blog, so I’m going to move that responsibility off to Twitter from now on. If you’re on Twitter, follow @fuzzmeasure to keep on top of the latest builds and news about FuzzMeasure.

If you’re not on Twitter (I don’t blame you—it can get addictive/distracting), you can subscribe to the @fuzzmeasure RSS feed instead. Also, RSS users should note that the latest build page has its own RSS feed as well (in the form of an appcast).

Apologies to my annoyed readers. I’ll try to post more actual content from now on. :)

Cross-posted from the toastycode blog

The day after Thanksgiving, November 28, has been declared National Day of Listening by the StoryCorps oral history project and NPR (among others).
The idea: With family in town, bellies full, and (hopefully) a little time off work, we might all take an hour to sit down and tell each other stories.
An essential part of the NDoL is to record those stories, because they probably don’t already exist on blogs or email or Twitter—particularly if the storyteller isn’t of the Internet generation.

We realized this is a perfect use for TapeDeck, our fast, fun, and foolproof audio recording software for Mac OS X. So this week we’re taking 20% off the price of TapeDeck with the hope that you’ll use it to capture your family’s stories this Friday.

Just download TapeDeck and press the big red REC button to get started.
By purchasing a registration you’ll remove TapeDeck’s time limits (so you can record for as long as you like); do so before Sunday, November 30 to get the discounted price.

We sincerely hope this helps you and your family start and preserve your own oral traditions. Happy Thanksgiving!   —Chris & Dan

Today marks the 4th anniversary of FuzzMeasure first going on sale. Of course, I started working on FuzzMeasure is a few months earlier (mid-June 2004), but folks typically don’t celebrate the date of their conception…

FuzzMeasure really has come a long way from when I first released it in 2004. It started out as a measurement tool for calculating the impedance curve of loudspeakers. Now it’s a very powerful general-purpose audio measurement tool used by professionals in acoustics, loudspeaker, computer, and live sound industries, to name a few.

On the business side, FuzzMeasure started as a part-time hobby. It made me some extra spending money, which I would promptly put back into the hobby. I would start out spending on small things like audio hardware for testing purposes. Over time, the income grew so that I could fund new Macs to develop my software on.

In February 2008, FuzzMeasure’s monthly revenue was at a level that allowed me to leave my full-time job. I took a pay cut to do it, but the understanding that the extra time would allow me to focus on new products (e.g. TapeDeck), and improve FuzzMeasure even further.

Since I’ve taken FuzzMeasure on full-time, I decided to focus on polishing FuzzMeasure up and ensuring that it continues to grow into the absolute best acoustics measurement package, on any platform. I have run the 3.1 beta completely in the open, so that I could keep customers engaged early in the process.

FuzzMeasure 3.1 will represent the latest milestone in the ongoing conversation with my customers. Many of the features and fixes were added in direct response to the requests of the users. The few features that were dreamed up by me got further refined by the feedback from the people who depend on FuzzMeasure regularly.

So, this post is a great, big Thank-You to all my customers, the readers of my blog, and anyone else directly or indirectly involved in the success that is FuzzMeasure. Without all of you, none of this would be possible.

There was an annoying slip-up with my implementation of the log axis “pixel width detection” code in the last beta, which I fixed in this release. You probably wouldn’t notice it unless you were on a higher resolution display and like to make your FuzzMeasure windows large—it’d manifest as a far-too-dense clumping of lines on the graph. I didn’t catch the problem when I first wrote the code from my laptop, but shortly after the release I noticed it on the 30″ LCD on my desktop. :P

Also, I checked in an improvement to the way I display distortion. I based my display style on that of older printed out B&W distortion graphs, which indicate the fundamental as a thick line, the 2nd harmonic as a normal width line, and the 3rd harmonic as a dashed line. I think it looks pretty good both on-screen and printed. It’s also much easier to distinguish between distortion harmonics than in previous releases.

I contemplated a handful of alternative solutions to this, including overlaying a legend for the graph, or splitting out the signal into separate harmonics in the measurement list, but this seems to work pretty well for now. Also, from a few published documents I’ve looked through (see image on left in comparison, FuzzMeasure graph on right), this appears to be a very well-understood style of graph.

This distortion fix is the last of the major problems I planned to solve in 3.1, so from now on I’ll consider the code frozen. I’ll only fix showstoppers from this point forward.

The next beta(s) I put out will focus on updating the supporting materials (documentation, links to the discussion groups, etc.) as well as any localization fixes that are required to match the new feature set.

So, go over to the latest build page and give FuzzMeasure 3.1b6 a try.