I hate to say anything negative about renoise since 2.5 is an incredible update, but I suspect this idea would be fairly quick to implement and could have big benefits…
I use the visual frequency analysis window a lot in Adobe Audition when mastering music, it can really help reinforce suspicions I might have about frequencies I’m hearing that need attenuating or boosting.
Critical to the usefulness of Audition’s spectrum is the fact that it updates at a high framerate (as long as you don’t use an insanely large FFT size), and more importantly there is no false visual ‘decay’ between frames. ie. each frame of the spectrum corresponds to the actual presence of frequencies at that point in time. With Renoise’s master spectrum the framerate seems fixed at something quite low. Even worse, the peak values on the graph decay towards silence quite slowly.
The best way to understand this is to download the attached xrns, press play and watch the master spectrum.
You’ll notice the peaks of the sinewave are still visibly fading away long after the sound has finished, this gives us a very blurry view of the audio and makes the spectrum fairly useless in my opinion…
What I would suggest is to let the user decide the FFT size (a tradeoff between precision and framerate) with a dropdown menu, and ditch the visual decay (or have a checkbox to disable it).
Any thoughts?