Generating an Excel file from .Net should be easy right? MS have good reason to have you using their formats as the de-facto standard and make it easy, huh.
Nope. Not really.
It’s a bit trickier than you might think.
Monthly Archives: April 2004
Better Better Bars
My younger brother has explained to me some of the intricacies of perceptual sound and yada-yada-yada
you’ll typically find that if the band for 18khz is showing any appreciable
level, that level will be reflected louder, lower down. Sounds with an
18khz component will almost certainly have matching (in terms of volume
envelope) components across a wide range (in linear terms) of frequencies in
the top end. For example – a hi-hat stills sounds like a hi-hat if you
low-pass filter it at 10k, the higher components aren’t really doing
anything different for our purposes.
…
So limiting your graph to say 60 > 12k or so would still be representing all
the zingy top and hefty bottom visually, but would do it more accurately (by
doing it less accurately, if you know what i mean!?!?).
level, that level will be reflected louder, lower down. Sounds with an
18khz component will almost certainly have matching (in terms of volume
envelope) components across a wide range (in linear terms) of frequencies in
the top end. For example – a hi-hat stills sounds like a hi-hat if you
low-pass filter it at 10k, the higher components aren’t really doing
anything different for our purposes.
…
So limiting your graph to say 60 > 12k or so would still be representing all
the zingy top and hefty bottom visually, but would do it more accurately (by
doing it less accurately, if you know what i mean!?!?).
So expect to see these ideas appearing in BetterBars.dll in a few weeks or so when I next get chance to touch it.
Better Bars 2
I finally got around to adding a couple more visualizations to Better Bars; the first being a stereo version of the standard ‘scope’ and the second being a trailing scan of the sound, looking something like an ultrasound. If you try Better Bars 2 then I’d appreciate some feedback on the performance of ‘Scan’ as it’s using BitBlt and seems to be a bit slow on my machine if you run it full screen.
Again, installation instructions are:
Save the file in the Visualizations folder of Windows Media Player, usually C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\Visualizations then run regsvr32 betterbars2.dll from a command line in that folder. You should now have ‘Better Bars’ as a Visualization in WMP.
[update: 05.04.2004.10:00 I should have checked this better before posting it - 'Scan' bombs out after running for a while as my off-screen buffer gets garbage collected while I'm not looking. I'll fix that tonight, hopefully.]
[update: 05.04.2004.20:39 Fixed it. When writing these, it turns out to be a good idea not to use the global namespace to store handles to things unless you want them garbage collected for you. 
]