Wiki » History » Version 5

Chris Cannam, 2014-07-21 06:24 PM

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h1. Flatten Dynamics
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This differs from a "musical" dynamics compressor because it should be fairly drastic, it doesn't need to be especially musical, and it wants to scale everything so as to have a quite predictable overall RMS level across the whole file.
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Generally speaking, a plugin using this to flatten out its input will probably also want to use its reported gain to un-flatten its output.
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Trying this out in the "Piano Evaluation of the Silvet Note Transcription plugin":/projects/silvet/wiki/Piano_Evaluation_for_Level_Normalisation
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I use the term "level" below where in implementation terms I'm using RMS -- some other sort of averaged level calculation might do.
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h3. First attempt
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As of commit:e36fe9312ad4
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The aim is just to make the level across a few seconds of audio tend toward some target.
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We have a target level T (example 0.05). Start with an initial gain G equal to 1.
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At each sample:
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* Update calculation of level of the past 4 seconds of audio
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* Find the gain G' that would be necessary to make that level equal to T (i.e. T / level)
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* Update our stored gain G to move it 1/N of the distance from G to G' (where N is 0.5 seconds in sample count)
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* Return the sample scaled by G
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h3. Possible alternative
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Aim to get the maximum level across the whole input, measured in a moving window of a few seconds length, scaled to our target T. We need to do this for the maximum-so-far (input is in real time).
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Meanwhile aim to get each individual sample scaled according to the local level, that of the past one or two seconds at most. This should be more like a compressor, some sort of knee'd or sigmoid curve that finds the difference between the locally-averaged recent level and the target level, scales this on the curve, then applies the resulting gain.
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Some experiments on this in commit:6b732542a34c which I'm testing out a bit in Silvet.