[AG-TECH] Idea for a feature

[Robert Olson]

At 03:45 PM 9/29/2003 -0400, jski at blargh.wpi.edu wrote:
>I was noticing that there is a quite a range of volume levels in use by the
>various nodes/PIGs etc. What if there existed a service or application,
>bound to the test room that would tell you when your volume was set
>correctly. It would be sort of like being able to look at the VU meters in
>RAT at the remote location. If everyone were able to set their level against
>a standard meter then there would be less of a problem of too much or not
>enough volume when you got into a meeting. You also would not require a
>remote node to test with every time you changed a setting (yes, we still
>need the test runs to make sure...) Could be handy for initial settings.

You can do a lot of this yourself by targetting your send levels to be 
peaking at the top of the green in rat (the rat meters are a fairly 
absolute scale).

A while ago I put together a network levelmeter tool:

http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/ag-tech/2001/09/msg00076.html

it's linux-only, and only works with L16-mono streams, but works well there.

>A second idea was for some sort of audio reflector. Some sort of delay, say
>10 seconds or so and it sends back whatever you sent to it exactly as it
>recieved it. This would be useful for adjusting your settings to prevent
>clipping, distortion, gate problems, ambient noise issues, etc. The audio
>reflector wouldn't be so good for setting gain levels though since I could
>compensate for low transmit levels with high recieve levels and think all
>was well until I got into a meeting.... that is where the first application
>would save the day.

Such a tool is indeed available from the UCL folks.

http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/ag-tech/1999/06/msg00039.html

There is also some discussion of this (as well as a detailed discussion of 
an audio leveling procedure) in my audio tutorial slides at
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/flevents/ag/agtut2003/

--bob