Oscilloscope for Sound Designing

[Keith Phillips]

While playing with/learning the Andromeda I wanted an oscilloscope to visualize some of the waveforms and such, so I tried a few, but wasn't really impressed. Usually the main problem wth them was that changing any frequency would cause the waveforms to move left or right too much, it would never lock onto the wave.

Found this one, Virtins Sound Card Multiinstrument, which has repeated triggering and can lock onto waveforms all up and down the keyboard with no problem. I found that you might have to toggle between 10-50msec window if you are moving from extremes of the keyboard to still get good visualization of the waves; but that is a normal characteristic of the wave lengths at those frequencies.

Heres a little screenshot of what it looks like, its *really easy* to use. This was a postive and negative sawtooth creating a PWM type of effect with some filter resonance and white noise added.



http://www.virtins.com/

Really handy tool. It is kind of neat to see how different the waveforms actually are from the fundamental shapes due to voltage limitations I guess.

[Timo]

Does that lock to the audio and display just a one-cycle waveform? What if you have an FM sound, or a quickly modulating signal where there is no static waveform to 'lock on' as it were?

I use wavelab for its oscilloscope display in realtime, but it's not awesome.

[Khazul]

You will also need to patch from an output on your audio interface to the input of whatever your default windows sound card is.

Seems there is no means to select audio card and certainly no ASIO support.

[Keith Phillips]

For complex waveforms it might be more tricky, but depending on the wave you could try changing the trigger sensitivity percentage for locking.

Out of the 5 or so software only oscilloscopes this is probably the best one I've seen so far though.