FuzzMeasure 3.2.2 - Fighting Poor Recording Levels

This afternoon I released FuzzMeasure 3.2.2, which you can download from http://fuzzmeasure.com.

The largest change in this release is an important one, as I believe I may have finally found a 'silver bullet' to deal with widespread confusion about FuzzMeasure's results. Now, FuzzMeasure will fail gracefully when a measurement is captured incorrectly, rather than giving you bad data.

You see, I get a lot of support emails from customers who are new to FuzzMeasure, and acoustic measurements in general. In many cases, their misunderstanding stems from the fact that FuzzMeasure will happily let you measure silence, and give you a meaningless graph.

Not any more!

FuzzMeasure now checks and ensures that there is a distinct impulse peak that should be well above the noise floor of a signal. This serves as a built-in failsafe that will force you to repeat measurements until you get your levels set up correctly.

Setting levels may be a combination of adjusting the volume of your amplifier to produce a louder input for your microphone, or changing the gain on your microphone preamplifier to pick up more signal. At any rate, you should be sure to use the Level Meter window to keep an eye on how quiet (or loud) your input is being picked up during the measurement.

In addition to this change, you can now also choose to normalize the impulse graph "post calculation." Just choose Impulse > Normalize from the main menu to enable this feature. This feature basically allows you to view the Envelope Time Curve and Log Squared Impulse Response with their peak at 0dB. Normalizing the record (Measurement > Normalize) would not necessarily guarantee this.

I also boosted performance considerably for users that find themselves viewing lots of Envelope Time Curve graphs. Because that calculation is very intensive, I now use a caching scheme that will stash already-calculated ETCs to disk for faster recall when switching between records.

If you hit any trouble, you can always email support@supermegaultragroovy.com with your concerns.