Miscellaneous Menu Items


   
        The main functions are also accessible through the right-click menu for greater simplicity.


        The View menu contains a variety of options to manipulate the screen appearance:

As mentioned in the Main Functions page, in certain modes of practice it is useful to have the graph trace stop when input ceases; similar to a voice-activated recording mode. For instance you may wish to sing or play a short phrase without looking at the graph, then check to see if your sense of intonation corresponds with what the graph drew. To switch between continuous trace or input-activated start and stop, check View | Trace Continuous [or input dependent]. [more work will be done here, to allow sensitivity relevant to different background noise levels]

You can Pause the trace to look at something (keyboard - P or Pause. Press any other key to resume).

You can hide the title bar and the menu at the top for a bit more room on the monitor.- Expand Screen (Keyboard F11; use F11 or Escape to return to normal maximized mode).This is very useful for smaller monitors, to give a larger graph. The menu bar slides down into view if you move the cursor to the top edge of the screen.

You can keep Tuningmeister Always on Top.
You can have the cursor hide itself when it is stationary, as it blinks annoyingly on some monitors.

You can turn on or off the black averaging trace in the lower graph.

The Volume Trace adds a gray background image of the sound level.

The VU meter can be placed at the top or at the right side, or hidden completely.

Tune Octave Above Range allows notes above the highest to be shown, in red to distinguish them, within the current range. This allows the upper graph to be less compressed, if desired.

Fine-tune Octave Below Range allows notes an octave deeper than the lowest note on the upper graph to appear on the lower graph, without scrunching in another octave in the upper graph. For example, this allows you to see the tuning of the lower SA on a tampura, as it usually lies below your lowest note.

Upper Graph Range Display...  The upper graph can show either the Full Range as selected by the lower and upper notes, or all the tuning can be reflected into a Single Octave graph (plus a tone, so activity on the cusp won't be divided). This gives a finer scale and is useful especially when the full range of the instrument is quite a few octaves, for instance for a sitar or a violin, where the semitones can get quite squeezed together in a Full Range graph. The disadvantage is that following a melody up or down beyond the edge of the graph requires the eye to do a "wraparound" movement.

The Trace Speed, in pixels per second, can be adjusted. At very fast rates you may get vertigo! but it could be useful to help transcribe very rapid passages.

The scale of the lower graph can be magnified or reduced. Ten cents per division gives the most general use, as the pitch will always be on scale in the lower graph. It is designed with enough space being given so that the trace will move to the adjacent note before going off scale. If you double the magnification to five cents, you will get more resolution; however, when the pitch strays too far it will come up against the edge of the graph. The extra magnification may be more helpful despite that. At two cents per division you get five times the resolution, and this is most useful for tuning an instrument note by note. I doubt it would have any use in examining a line of music - notes would easily go way off scale.
    Alternatively, for (especially Western) singers with wide vibrato, the spread of their pitch vibrating on a single note will oscillate into the space of adjoining semitones, and the information will be useless. Scaling of the lower graph can in this case be compressed, by selecting 20, 30 or 40 cents per division, depending on how wide the vibrato fluctuates. For an example, if a vibrato swings a semitone on either side of the pitch, the graph at 20 cents per division will encompass it completely, but only if the note is exactly placed. Hence 30 cents per division will be the right choice in that instance. Simple experimentation will find the right scaling for your vibrato.
    The plot should eventually settle on the semitone that is closest to the center of the note, and the black averaging trace can help you sense how centered your pitch is. Note that this feature is only partially effective, and more programming needs to be done. It may take some time to find the note when a new one begins, for instance (even so, that will always be a bit shaky). This feature will not work well if there is any interference from other sounds or musical lines.
   


The lines in the upper graph might look better wider or narrower, to your taste (and the dot pitch of your monitor).

Compressing the waveform is used to adjust the horizontal scale for the oscilloscope function, for very low notes. No doubt this should get moved, and become a button accompanying the 'scope.

Western note names, A B C etc or Hindustani names are alternative options.



All the items in the bottom grouping of the View menu relate to a different display for Western musicians; they aren’t applicable to the Indian music display. Checking Staff Notation switches to that other mode.




       The Options menu holds most of the main functions. Items not yet discussed:

    The input can be mono, or stereo. One can show the tuning from just the right or left channel of a stereo input - this is a good choice if a melody instrument is much stronger on one side or the other in a recording.
    The stereo input shows two traces, if one wanted to analyze two separate instruments. To use this you need a preamp plugged in to the line-in connector of the sound card, as most cards support only a mono microphone input. If the instruments are not equal in range, octave shifts are possible to keep them closer together on the graph. In stereo mode, the lower graph can be either two separate charts, or one with two traces superimposed, perhaps useful for instruments trying to play in unison.  Toggle this at View | Multiview.


Other, advanced,  items in the Options menu:
In Tuning plus Echo mode the computer plays back to you the note of the scale nearest to what it hears. You need to inhibit feedback from the speakers into the microphone; perhaps headphones might be necessary. Try placing the microphone as close to the mouth or instrument as possible - a headset might work for singers.  Some technical parameters can be adjusted under Parameters | Echo but overall, the Windows sound system makes this very difficult to work properly.

You can record a session to a standard Windows .wav file while you watch the tuning trace. After you Halt the tuning trace, or uncheck Save Input Data to Disk File, you can Save the file name As whatever you like, to play back later with whatever media player you use on your system.

You can save the tuning data to a proprietary file. This saves the pitch and volume information pixel by pixel. You can then view the graph information. Again, after you Halt the tuning trace, or uncheck Save Tuning Data to Disk File; just enter the file name for saving.
Then you can review the data from Options | Display Tuning File, which prompts you to specify which tuning file you wish to view. The time from the beginning of the file is shown in the upper left.

The interface is very crude at the moment; just move around through the arrow, paging, home, and end keys.

Home - beginning of file; End - end of file;
Left - back one screen width; Right - forward one screen width;
Up - back 1/4 screen width; Down - forward 1/4 screen width;
Shift/Up - back 1/16 screen width; Shift/Down - forward 1/16 screen width;
Ctrl/Up - back 1 pixel; Ctrl/Down - forward 1 pixel;
Page Up - back 5 screen widths; Page Down - forward 5 screen widths;
Shift/Page Up - back 25 screen widths; Shift/Page Down - forward 25 screen widths;





Tuning Meister remembers all the settings from the previous session and closes and opens without changing its current display parameters.



If you want a different color scheme you can create a new palette, add it to the Palette menu and use that instead of the default. You can manipulate that menu just as you do the Instrument and Scale menus through their respective dialogs. Currently the dialog is started from the Parameters menu. As monitors differ you will at least want to see that the dark and light versions of a color are easily distinguished from each other, and yet not too dark or light to be easily seen for their color. [one prime example - I found the basic solid yellow (Ga or E) far too light to stand out strongly against the white background. It appears not nearly as saturated as all the other colors. The addition of some red makes a rather golden hue that is much more readable].

The Soundcard menu allows you to set the parameters for recording, that is, 8 or 16 bit, and 44.1 or 48 kHz.
If you have more than one sound card in your system, Soundcard will list them so you can switch to one that is not the default.
You can calibrate your soundcard’s data rate against the (supposedly much more accurate) computer’s internal timer. Because Windows is not a real-time Operating System, this procedure can give slightly inaccurate readings [and takes some minutes in order to obtain needed accuracy]. I should try to automate this, but for the moment, run the calibration 3 times. If all the readings are the same (or +- 1 or 2), stop and keep that value. Otherwise continue until you see which is the most common result, as that should be the most accurate one, then stop. Separate calibrations need to be done for 48 and 44 kHz, if you use both. Once calibrated, the absolute pitch should be accurate (that is, 440 Hz for A, for instance). I have not encountered any tendency for these values to change, so it need be done only once. Another calibration, very quick, measures the DC offset of the soundcard's zero level. Just be sure the line is quiet and with one click the measurement is finished.


Most of the other items should be self-explanatory; just try them out to see whether they make your screen easier to read.


  FILE BACK-UP

There are several files that you should consider backing up. These are TM Scales.dta, TM Instruments.dta, and also TM palette.dta if you have created any color schemes. They are quite small files so just save them someplace else on your hard disk, as well as in whatever external back-up you make. Back up both files TM Scales.dta and TM Instruments.dta together, as they are linked. If the Scales file doesn't correspond to the arrangement of files that the Instrument file references, you will have problems.

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