As far as LED's/LAMPS for peak values go, I should be able to combine the LVU implementation with the AIMP skins to provide a needle and Lamp for both left and right meters as Hiccup has requested. It will just require a bit of a mashup of the different INI file formats.
That would be great. I have some new insights in the sense that this may be more useful than I expressed the last time I had an opinion on this ;-)
Foobar support is dead in the water. I've done all I can there. in terms of appearance it shouldn't be hard for people to make similar skins in the AIMP/LVU formats.
It's a pity it has cost you so much time and effort, but I agree that if the AIMP skins work well, we can do without support for foobar2000 skins.
A large amount of the available AIMP skins are ports from foobar2000 skins anyway.
But thanks for giving this a serious shot!
About the needle action.
I have played around with the two new sample sliders, and it seems an interesting option.
Yet at the moment I think that some optimal setting for the two can be decided on that will work well for all needles, and it may not need to be an additionally available setting option.
But it's a bit hard to be sure about that because in my opinion the basic needle response should be improved upon first.
When that is really good, additional settings for 'samples' and linear curves may not be needed or useful at all.
(less is more, KISS, etc.)
Here's an interesting discovery I made about this:
I was curious about the needle action of professional VU meters.
Reading some articles on it revealed that the needle should go from ∞ to 0 dB in 300 ms. (for a 1kHz sine wave)
Then I started fooling around with AIMPs MobilityNegative and MobilityPositive settings to see if I could get it to have such a response, and I found that the values that are set for those correspond to exactly that.
So if you set the value to 0.3, it takes the needle 300 ms to travel that distance.
0.1 makes it take one second, etc.
(why the hell didn't they just name it RiseTime and FallTime?)
Here are two test files, one for 300ms and one for 1 sec., and two skins, one set to 0.3 sec. and the other to 1 sec. rise/fall times.
They may be helpful for trying to get optimal compatibility with the needle action that is set for AIMP skins.
Here you can see how AIMP is correctly applying 1 sec. fall/rise, and VUMeter™ is not:
Two other things that I hope can be improved upon:
- audio/graphics sync is still not great, the needle trailing a little bit behind the music.
- the needle often seems a bit nervous and jumpy. It's especially noticeable with thinner needles and fast moving needles.
Could it be that the frame-rate of the needle image is a bit low?
(I hope you're still having fun with this ;-)
And a final observation for now:
I noticed that the meter now seems to get the sound post-ReplayGain adjustment.
Has that been changed, and is it intentional?
I'm not sure that I like it, since for a lot of my music the needle now only uses a small part of the scale.
Is it also post-equaliser and possible VST or Winamp plugins?
Perhaps it could be an option setting to have it operating pre- or post?
edit:
And something I thought I reported earlier, but it seems that I didn't:
I noticed that the plugin seems to ignore the value that is set for ZeroLevel?
So when e.g. having 'ZeroLevel=-3', the needle should indicate -3dB at the zero level position, but instead it always uses 0dB.
Similarly, I'm not sure what it does with MaxLevel, if anything?
It would be good if it did use/respect these values, since it is useful for some skins to be able to set e.g. MaxLevel to 0dB and ZeroLevel to -6dB.
And same as the fall/rise aspect, it's also a factor in existing AIMP skins behaving as they are intended to.
