Revision History - v7.40

Daqarta v7.40.1 - 29 August 2013

Bug Fix: Spectrogram defaulted to Pitch Track mode on initial start-up.

Daqarta v7.40 - 10 July 2013

Sound Card Performance Tests topic added, with extensive test results on 4 USB sound cards in the US $15-85 price range, plus a built-in laptop chipset for comparison.

Completely re-engineered precision Phase Meter mini-app now has much greater resistance to noise, distortion, and interference, plus now includes options for plotting to screen and file, as well as data logging.

Enhanced IMD Meter mini-app now includes adjustable meter time constant for jitter reduction, spectrum averaging for additional jitter reduction, waveform averaging for noise reduction, and Percent / dB readout toggle.

Enhanced THD Meter mini-app now includes adjustable maximum harmonic number, adjustable meter time constant and Percent / dB readout toggle in addition to existing averaging options, as above.

Dragging dialogs or custom meters no longer blocks trace updates; they continue at about half the normal rate (twice the Trace Update Interval).

Custom Controls dialogs now support up to 8 buttons. The added 4 buttons (Btn4 to Btn7) are hidden by default, until their Titles or Types are set.

For reading DDisk files, the position readout now supports two new absolute time modes: Local Time and UTC Time. These allow you to go directly to an event in the file based on the actual time it happened, instead of relative to the start of the recording. Also, for very long recordings, the readout now supports multiple days using dd> hh:mm:ss.nnn format.

Multitasking macros can now control the horizontal and vertical display ranges and vertical units using Buf0#R=n, Buf0#V=n, Buf0#U="Deg", and related commands. Macros that save data to .DQA files can likewise control the ranges and units that will be used when the file is later opened in Daqarta.

Custom Macro Messages using Msg can now control title, color, position, and font parameters via extensions to the Msg command such as Msg="<P(x,y)" instead of assorted named commands like MsgPos. The extended format is the same as that used by Custom Meters (Mtr0, etc.) and allows macro expressions for parameters (instead of only explicit immediate values as in the named commands.)

New ZeroScrn?% read-only macro always returns percent, regardless of current Screen / Data Zero Units mode.

MIDI Changes scripts can now display strings and variables on a Custom Macro Message or on any of the four Custom Meters Mtr0-Mtr3, with full control of position, size, color, and other parameters via standard macro commands. They can be dragged to any desired location, and the meters can be resized by dragging corners or borders.

On start-up, all unused output sources other than Wave are now muted to prevent accidental contamination of output with Line In or Mic, etc.

Bug Fix: MIDI/Synth volume and mute state could be erroneously mapped to operate on other output controls, causing strange interactions. (Since the MIDI/Synth volume is set to minimum and mute is set on when Daqarta starts, such interactions could happen even for non-MIDI operation.)

Bug Fix: Attempting to use certain hot-keys before Daqarta's start-up splash screen finished could cause lock-up.

Bug Fix: Certain macro expressions using parentheses could give erroneous results.

Bug Fix: The Spectrum of a wave average could show an erroneous large DC value.

Bug Fix: Auto-Calibrate failed to work with certain sound cards having no Input Line Selects, Line Levels, or Master Level.

Bug Fix: If Auto-Calibrate was unable to complete Duplex Delay calibration for a particular combination of input and output channels, it failed the whole Duplex Delay test. Now it skips to the next combination.

Bug Fix: When Macro Array buffers Buf0-Buf7 were accessed as single elements in an expression like A=Buf0[N], the value of index N was not limit-tested and could crash Daqarta if sufficiently out of bounds.

Bug Fix: A Custom Meter that was updated on each trace update via a multitasking macro could jump back to its prior width on release from corner-drag resizing.

Bug Fix: Macro names with '_' like Atten_dB?, Atten_G?, and SPL_TC were not accepted on the right side of expressions except within parentheses. (The underscore was treated like a line continuation.)

Bug Fix: Setting or testing variables with text equivalents such as IF.UA="z" failed.

Bug Fix: Sound cards with Phono In lines were mislabeled as extra Line In.

Bug Fix: Macro (and MIDI) math operations using the division operator / (or the reverse division operator \ for Macro Array buffers Buf0-Buf7) returned an error value (essentially "negative infinity") for the case of 0 / 0. (This is a standard "feature" of the processor Floating Point Unit.) The default is now to return 1.00 in this case. The behavior can be changed via the Posn#Z macro to return 0 or the standard negative infinity.

Bug Fix: Macro Array buffer Buf0-Buf7 reverse division of each element into a constant K via Buf0="<\(K)" gave erroneous results if K = 0. Now sets all elements to zero.

Bug Fix: When appending macro array buffers to files in .DQA format, the stored file time was actually local instead of UTC, causing File Info to show the wrong times.

Bug Fix: Atten_dB? and Atten_G? now properly support sound cards that don't have separate Left and Right Input range controls. If you use Atten_G?1 to read the Right Input Line Level, the Left Input level will be read instead (since that single control adjusts both channels).

Bug Fix: Generator controls that had been disabled during file open operations were not re-enabled unless the Generator dialog was open, causing macros that tried to operate them to abort.

Bug Fix: Activating a macro before concluding an entry in a main Daqarta control could cause spurious operations.

Bug Fix: When reading DDisk files, direct entry to the file position control ignored Decimate, if active, with units set to seconds or H:M:S.

Bug Fix: MIDI Volume controls in Pitch-to-MIDI dialog (and Synth Volume in Synth Controls dialog) did not change displayed values when MIDI volume was changed via Windows own volume control.

Bug Fix: MIDI/Synth volume did not work on Vista and later Windows versions that only support Master. Now, MIDI/Synth volume is a duplicate of Master on these systems.

Bug Fix: Use dB under Attenuator Options dialog (to combine calibrated Wave and Master controls into a single long dB slider) did not work properly on Vista and later systems that no longer support Wave volume.

Bug Fix: When Buf0#S=n was used to preset a macro array file save operation to use less than the default 1024 points, it was not automatically reset to 1024 after the save.