REW Beta Release various minor issues with REW

cgull

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Jul 13, 2019
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Boston
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Preamp, Processor or Receiver
denon avr-s740h
Front Speakers
polk t50
Center Channel Speaker
polk t30
Surround Speakers
polk t15
Front Height Speakers
polk t15
Subwoofers
mtx sw2
Hi,

First off, thanks for REW! It's a very nice tool.

I'm having some minor issues with it, none serious, but I thought I'd comment. My on-the-cheap setup is:

* Lenovo x120e laptop with Windows 10 and 8GB of RAM
* Dayton IMM-6, connected to the laptop's headset jack with a 25' "Kabelsdirect" TRRS extension cable
* HDMI to a Denon AVR-S740H and 7.1.2 speakers
* REW 5.20 beta 15 with the private-JRE installer
* ASIO4ALL

Since this laptop is so slow, I also have REW 5.20 beta 15 installed on a late-2014 27" iMac to review/analyze.

Things I've noticed:

* I'm also playing with some old non-measurement mics I have, none measurement grade. These all have 2 or 3 pin connectors, so I'm using an old consumer-grade USB audio dongle for them. Switching between mics on the headset jack and the USB audio dongle is painful. I have to do things like disable the other mic in Windows control panels, make sure the Windows control panel is not up when starting REW, making sure shared-mode sampling is set to 48kHz in the device control panels, and all sorts of other voodoo. It works, most of the time, after lots of poking. I think some of this is exacerbated by bugs in the USB-audio driver, bugs/flakiness with ASIO4ALL, etc, so it is clearly not all or even much about REW, but it is annoying and underdocumented. One thought: could REW use ASIO4ALL for output (for HDMI), but use other access methods for input? That might (or might not) ease a lot of this pain. Not super important, a better solution here might be an adapter cable.

* The x120e is a slow machine by modern standards, almost a netbook (except with more memory). The UI is painfully slow in some places, like doing measurements. It'll take around 5 seconds after hitting the Start button, just to redraw elements on the pane grayed out and such. Using Alt-uparrow will take 2-3 seconds to go from measurement to measurement, much of it doing the little tab-slide animation. Also, sometimes when I Check Levels on the measurement pane, the test tone plays and is shown on the running SPL graph, but "Levels Too Low" is reported and the numeric figure is that of the noise in the room, not whatever the speaker put out. I think the program misses the tone during its FFT processing because it starts the tone playback/sample recording fairly quickly, but the UI update takes several seconds. I also sometimes get clicks during sweeps (which of course I re-run). The proper answer to this is probably "find a faster laptop already!" (and I have a couple of possibilities) but this was the best candidate at the time. Is there anything I/we can do to lighten the UI? I suspect the running SPL graph on the measurement pane may be too heavy a load on this machine, can it be turned off?

* On my Mac (and Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 5000), shift-cmd-<N> to select different smoothing doesn't work, the display doesn't change. Sometimes I can see that it flips to the other state (smoothed/unsmoothed) and right back again, if the UI updates manage to show correctly. (Or at least it was doing this yesterday-- now the problem seems to be gone, it's working fine.)

* On the Mac: If you load a measurement set, move a measurement tab by dragging it up/down the list, and then Save All, you will get prompted for a file comment, but you will not get a file save dialog and no file write happens. (I'll guess your code thinks nothing has changed and nothing needs to be saved, it's *almost* right)

Again, thanks!
 

John Mulcahy

REW Author
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Apr 3, 2017
Messages
7,212
Behaviour could be a bit odd on the mac at the moment. I tried to fix the lack of menu bar when on windows other than the main window some releases back, which worked OK, but the fix has resulted in two menu bars existing when on the main window, so actions can be executed twice (for smoothing applying twice removes the smoothing, as you observed). I've sorted that out for the next build.

For the mics make sure that you select something else as the Windows default recording device.

I doubt the graphics problems on the x120e are due to excessive UI load from REW. I run the macOS builds on a late 2012 low spec mac mini for example, no issues there, and folk run REW on a very wide range of hardware, some of which could be reasonably described as ancient :). Win10 had/has issues with some integrated graphics devices that predate it. Driver updates sometimes fix that. Disabling Java's attempts to use hardware acceleration might help, how to do that is shown in this thread.
 

cgull

Registered
Thread Starter
Joined
Jul 13, 2019
Messages
23
Location
Boston
More  
Preamp, Processor or Receiver
denon avr-s740h
Front Speakers
polk t50
Center Channel Speaker
polk t30
Surround Speakers
polk t15
Front Height Speakers
polk t15
Subwoofers
mtx sw2
`-Dsun.java2d.d3d=false` did seem to help a fair bit on that laptop, which I would totally describe as ancient. It's still rather slow of course but the worst UI slowness seems mostly gone. Turns out the laptop has a 100Hz hum on the mic input, not fatal for measurements but enough to make me find another laptop. Thanks for the tips on the other things too.
 
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