Hi, using SpectraLayers 12.0 and the “Master Rank” setting for the Harmonics Selection tool has gone missing, to be replaced with “Tolerance”.
I can’t figure out what this does, but it certainly doesn’t do the same thing as Master Rank, which was a really useful function when editing things like vehicle engine recordings.
The Polygon lasso tool is also working rather strangely in that you sometimes now need to use SHIFT+CLICK rather than CLICK to set the points for the lasso to work.
Thanks,
Mark.
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oh my, that would mess up my workflow!
You don’t need Master Rank anymore. SpectraLayers 12 introduces a much more intuitive way to select harmonics.
See:
Now you just select any frequency, and then while doing your selection, move to the closest harmonic next to the one you’re selecting. All the harmonics are then automatically selected.
The Tolerance parameter is a new parameter that didn’t exist in previous version, it allows you to not select parts of specific harmonics that don’t have enough power to be considered part of the whole harmonic structure. It allows to not include unwanted noise into the selection. If you increase that parameter to the max, it’s similar to the old behavior, not discriminating what harmonics to select.
I can indeed repro the issue with the Poly Lasso.
Ahh damn, ok, thanks for highlighting that so quickly Robin. My bad!
I did watch the Dom video…but not yet the workflow
just being able to back up a bit with freq selection should save oodles of editing time
“Unwanted noise” …
that is lower in amplitude?
What if unwanted noise is higher in amplitude?
I guess I need to try the tool…I can’t get SL12 yet at this time
As I’m using harm selection in SL11 at the moment, I like to include 26 harmonics for human talking (below 4K)…sometimes too much; sometimes not enough, but 26 works for me
well, if I use the freq select and then press H to expand the selection to harmonics, the max harmonics is 20…So I use the harmonic selection tool to get 26 harmonics…manually selecting the other 6 harmonics is actually really tedious work to avoid unwanteds; it’s much easier to deselect the areas with selection brush to subtract; or use a brush size sufficient to select all the audio over 26 harmonics. I don’t find a user preference for the number of harmonics for going from freq select. Are you saying the SL12 freq select “knows” which harmonics to select depending upon the Tolerance setting?
Yes, see this SL12 example, I set Max Harmonics to 50 (much more than I need), and set the Tolerance to 28dB, then click one harmonic, dragged horizontally, and then moved to the closest harmonic to select the whole range. Here’s what it does:
Notice how it does not select data above what’s really needed, and how it eliminate parts with no relevant signal inside the harmonic scale.
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This right here is worth the price of admission; wow, looking forward to this
will this work on higher freq consonants? would not user need to point the tool to whatever harmonic? and that is done with the freq selection tool; to set the base freq?
I would like to know more about the history functions (undo levels)…so now like selections types essentially become one history step?
I realize this is off topic 
Yes, the History panel will now merge events, when they are applied in a certain time window (default is 1500ms I believe, but you can change the value in the Preferences). It surely helps to keep the history cleaner, but there might also be a risk to be unable to undo just the last step(s) you would like to undo. You might have to find the right time value for your workflow.
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