Two small usability requests

[windchimes]

Really loving REW! Thank you John. I am using it for distortion measurements on audio devices, with a Focusrite Scarlett Solo, driven by a Mac laptop. But I have two very small usability requests.

1. When I click File/Export, the window that pops up doesn't fit on my laptop screen, can't be resized, and has no scroll bar. The dock overlays the OK button so I can't click it. So I can only export data when I'm on an external monitor. Could this window be made to be resizeable, and have a scroll bar when it becomes too small to fit everything at once?
2. I have been measuring some very high gain devices (up to 80dB, I am guessing). I use a stepped sine, fixed frequency with amplitude steps, to measure the THD+N vs level and gain nonlinearity. However, when I look at the data in SPL&Phase, and set the Y axis to V/V (to shown voltage gain directly in dB), the Y axis upper limit is capped at 60 dB. If I open the limits window and manually type in 80, it gets changed to 60. I can't see my data! Hopefully it is minor to remove this hard limit? (To create the third image, I typed in 80 and hit tab.)

Thanks in advance.

 

[John Mulcahy]

I have adjusted the V/V upper limit to 120 dB.

For the export dialog try reducing the font size in the View preferences font options slightly. The test for whether a more compact layout is required wasn't taking into account the effect of the font choice, I've amended that for the next build. Hopefully that will fix the issue, but I would have expected the current test to work on your screen. Please attach the file rew_output.txt from the REW folder, ~/Library/Logs/REW.

 

[windchimes]

John, thank you for the tip! I changed my font size from 13 to 11. That's a little small for my bad eyesight but the window fits now. I attached the file you requested.

I assume I will need to install a new version to see the increased limit?

One (or two) more requests while I have your ear. I am currently making comparison measurements on 8-odd different devices. I do a stepped sine at fixed frequency, variable amplitude to establish clipping level of each device, then I do a frequency sweep on each DUT with the amplitude informed by the first test. This works great! I then use Export/Export all measurements as text to generate csv's, which I can plot using Python/pandas.

One note is that the modern convention (at least on mac and linux) is to not have a special character at the start of the header line - the '*' ends up as part of the first column name when using eg pd.csv_read. Likewise, while the spaces in the column names make the csv more human readable, by default they end up in the column names. So I get results as follows.

I am not one to advocate for breaking changes in code but modernizing those two conventions (or offering them as an option) is something you could consider.

Second request: is it possible to add an "Export/Export all distortion data as text", in analogy with "Export/Export all measurements as text"? The latter is really convenient. I'm not doing measurements at production level so exporting the distortion data separately isn't a huge deal, but it does feel like it could lend itself to automation.

Best wishes

 

[John Mulcahy]

You should probably update to the V5.40 beta and pull the data you want directly over the REW API.

 

[windchimes]

Yes, I know that. Will do