Stereo View

In the spectral editing mode, Acoustica can draw the stereo image as colour. Instead of one spectrogram per channel, Panning as Hue shows a single spectrogram in which the colour of each time-frequency component tells you where in the stereo image that component sits: orange for content panned to the left, blue for content panned to the right, and near-white for content in the centre or equally present in both channels.

This makes things visible that an ordinary spectrogram cannot show: a lead vocal sitting dead centre while a noise sits out to one side, or reverb spreading away from a dry signal that is panned hard. The Amplitude spectrum (dB) legend changes to match — it becomes two-dimensional, with level along its width and pan position up its height, so you can read a colour in the spectrogram back to both a level and a position.

Choosing a Channel Mode

Three channel modes are available from the buttons in the bottom left corner of the spectrogram, where the active mode is highlighted. They are also in the dropdown beside the spectrogram toggle button, under the Channel Mode heading:

• Discrete Channels

  Displays each audio channel as its own spectrogram. This mode is unavailable when the clip editor is too short to give every channel a usable height, and Acoustica falls back to Channel Mean until you make it taller.

• Channel Mean

  Takes the mean of all channels and displays a single spectrogram.

• Panning as Hue

  Displays a single spectrogram with the panning shown as colour, as described above.

The channel modes need a recording with two or more channels, so they do not appear for mono material. Panning as Hue is a property of the spectrogram, so its button appears only in the spectral editing mode; the other two are available in the waveform view as well.

Multichannel recordings are not excluded. Acoustica works out the left and right content of each time-frequency component from the speaker position of every channel, so a 5.1 or 9.1.6 recording is folded down to a left-to-right image in the same way a stereo file is.

Selecting a Pan Range

Panning as Hue replaces the channel selection buttons with a vertical pan range strip to the left of the spectrogram. It has three parts: the Left to right pan (%) axis, which runs from 100 at the top, where content is panned fully left, through 0 in the centre, to -100 at the bottom, where content is panned fully right; the colour gradient the spectrogram uses; and a narrow control column to the right of that gradient, holding the range indicator. The range starts at the full stereo image.

Drag the range indicator to narrow it:

• Drag either end of the indicator to move that limit alone.
• Drag the middle of the indicator to move the whole range without changing its width.
• Double click in the control column to reset it to the full stereo image.

Narrowing the pan range restricts the selection in the same way a frequency range does, and it does so for both listening and processing. Playback of the selection is filtered to the pan range you have set, so you can solo a narrow slice of the stereo image and hear exactly what is in it before deciding what to do. Any processing you then apply is confined to that same range, leaving the rest of the stereo image untouched.

The pan range combines with everything else in a spectral selection — a time range, a frequency range, a shape drawn with one of the selection tools, and time and frequency feathering.

Note

The pan range belongs to Panning as Hue. Switching to Discrete Channels or Channel Mean, or back to the waveform view, discards it and returns the selection to the full stereo image.