Oscilloscope VST in Sonar?

[carlo]

Hi,

Is there some kind of Oscilloscope plugin in Sonar or same kind of Spectral Sound Analyser available?

THX

[mettelus]

Melda's MOscilloscope is part of their Free FX Bundle and one of the better ones out there. One of the best free spectrum analyzer's out there is Voxengo's SPAN. Both are free and have been around for years; and being 3rd party, they are not bound to any DAW or video editor so can be freely used in anything that can host VSTs.

[Chaps]

56 minutes ago, mettelus said:

Melda's MOscilloscope is part of their Free FX Bundle and one of the better ones out there. One of the best free spectrum analyzer's out there is Voxengo's SPAN. Both are free and have been around for years; and being 3rd party, they are not bound to any DAW or video editor so can be freely used in anything that can host VSTs.

The only one of those I've used is Voxengo's Span. I have found it very useful over the years. I particularly like that you can hold down the  Ctrl key and scrub across the audio and only hear the frequencies you are scrubbing.

[carlo]

Really thank you very much! 

[Amberwolf]

9 minutes ago, Chaps said:

The only one of those I've used is Voxengo's Span. I have found it very useful over the years. I particularly like that you can hold down the  Ctrl key and scrub across the audio and only hear the frequencies you are scrubbing.

There's a feature I didn't know about, even using SPAN for ages!   I will have to try that out, because I often have troulbe with things in mixes and don't know where they're coming from, and my actual hearing is messed up by severe tinnitus, etc., so sometimes I can't even tell where something is amiss, and visually it looks ok.

 

Edited October 6 by Amberwolf

[Chaps]

3 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

There's a feature I didn't know about, even using SPAN for ages!   I will have to try that out, because I often have troulbe with things in mixes and don't know where they're coming from, and my actual hearing is messed up by severe tinnitus, etc., so sometimes I can't even tell where something is amiss, and visually it looks ok.

 

I cheated and read the manual.  Equalizer – Narrow-Band Sweeping. Also, the higher the mouse cursor is to the top, the louder that audio will be, so it's like a volume control.

[mettelus]

1 hour ago, Chaps said:

I cheated and read the manual.

Shame on you!  In all seriousness, there are a lot of "hidden" features built into the free SPAN that not many use or even know about. I cheat even more to an extent by Googling "Can [this app] to [this detailed task]" quite often. Even simple things like overlapping tracks to visually see frequency collisions the free version can do just fine. I posted a gif analyzing a phase switch I installed in my guitar on the the old forums here (hard to believe that was over 10 years ago already). I inserted the SPAN gif from that post below.

[carlo]

I have installed Sonic Visualizer that shows different aspects of the audio as you can see on attached picture. 

 

[PopStarWannabe]

Isn't there a spectral analyser already included in Sonar's ProChannel's EQ ?  When you click Open Zoom Window it even gets magnified...

[Wookiee]

11 minutes ago, PopStarWannabe said:

Isn't there a spectral analyser already included in Sonar's ProChannel's EQ ?  When you click Open Zoom Window it even gets magnified...

It has a built in FFS display, but SPANs is superior, there is free and advanced paid version of SPAN.

[mettelus]

2 hours ago, carlo said:

I have installed Sonic Visualizer that shows different aspects of the audio as you can see on attached picture. 

Roger that. The term for that one is "spectrogram" which gives a visual representation of frequency intensity and creates a "track view." Spectrum Analyzers (like SPAN) are basically if you turn the "now time" into a knife and are viewing the spectrogram's cross section as the play head moves (just the now time location is displayed). They each have their purpose in one's tool kit.

Regarding spectrograms in particular, they are often used in post-production for things like noise removal, surgical tweaks, and other editing tasks. What differentiates them are the tools included, but most have selection tools that literally work with the spectrogram as if it were a picture (lasso/selection, erasers, "heal" tools to meld content uniformly (essentially a "blur" brush in a picture app)). Depending on what you want to do with a spectrogram app, you may need to get a higher (i.e., not free) version, with Steinberg's SpectraLayers and iZotope's RX being the most comprehensive IMO. For noise removal in particular, apps that can capture a "noise print" from an area that is supposed to be silent (often the lead in/fade out portion of an audio track) and then remove that noise print from the rest of the track are the most effective.

[carlo]

1 hour ago, mettelus said:

Roger that. The term for that one is "spectrogram" which gives a visual representation of frequency intensity and creates a "track view." Spectrum Analyzers (like SPAN) are basically if you turn the "now time" into a knife and are viewing the spectrogram's cross section as the play head moves (just the now time location is displayed). They each have their purpose in one's tool kit.

Regarding spectrograms in particular, they are often used in post-production for things like noise removal, surgical tweaks, and other editing tasks. What differentiates them are the tools included, but most have selection tools that literally work with the spectrogram as if it were a picture (lasso/selection, erasers, "heal" tools to meld content uniformly (essentially a "blur" brush in a picture app)). Depending on what you want to do with a spectrogram app, you may need to get a higher (i.e., not free) version, with Steinberg's SpectraLayers and iZotope's RX being the most comprehensive IMO. For noise removal in particular, apps that can capture a "noise print" from an area that is supposed to be silent (often the lead in/fade out portion of an audio track) and then remove that noise print from the rest of the track are the most effective.

Thank you for the explanation! I am looking for the harmonic content of an audio file. It would be great if we have a 3D graphic for that! 

Thx

[mettelus]

On 10/7/2025 at 12:59 PM, carlo said:

It would be great if we have a 3D graphic for that!

Google 3D spectrogram. iZotope's Insight (included with Ozone bundles) is the one I use, and I also believe T-Racks has a 3D spectrogram as well, but not sure. There are also probably others.

Although 3D can look cool, precision editing is better achieved in the 2D format (intensity = vertical height), with the utmost importance on the resolution of the spectrogram... as long as the resolution is high enough, harmonics stand out readily in 2D format and are easy to select/edit. The other advantage to SpectraLayers and Ozone is that you can separate stems first (not perfect, but workable), which allows you to isolate harmonics to the instrument you want to focus on (if the wave file is already mixed). You can also do such in a two-step process (there are free stem separators out there)... separate stems, edit via spectrogram in a DAW, then re-assemble in the DAW. A caution with stem separation though, they often leave residual frequencies in one stem belonging to another, so isolating a stem to be "pristine" may require a lot more effort than you bargained for.

[Amberwolf]

3 hours ago, mettelus said:

A caution with stem separation though, they often leave residual frequencies in one stem belonging to another, so isolating a stem to be "pristine" may require a lot more effort than you bargained for.

Yes.  I have a synth phrase used for the main theme in Drywater, Mars that needed the arp to to be managed separately from the rest, but chunks of the main part that were on the arp hit times also got kept with the arp.  

Ths was an effect I used on purpose for part of it, but in the sequel Intercept where i reprise the theme for part of the track to represent the heroes' ship, I didn't want that, so I used and automated Sonitus EQ in the clip fx bin to lower the main frequencies of the arp that stood out in the sections I didn't want them to, without affecting the main part so drastically as the separation did.  

 

(I actually used part of the separated-version sizzles of the main synth line just before the 3 minute mark in Intercept as an effect for timing...so, someitmes the separation accidents can be useful). 

 

Edited October 9 by Amberwolf

[carlo]

On 10/8/2025 at 8:36 PM, mettelus said:

Google 3D spectrogram. iZotope's Insight (included with Ozone bundles) is the one I use, and I also believe T-Racks has a 3D spectrogram as well, but not sure. There are also probably others.

Although 3D can look cool, precision editing is better achieved in the 2D format (intensity = vertical height), with the utmost importance on the resolution of the spectrogram... as long as the resolution is high enough, harmonics stand out readily in 2D format and are easy to select/edit. The other advantage to SpectraLayers and Ozone is that you can separate stems first (not perfect, but workable), which allows you to isolate harmonics to the instrument you want to focus on (if the wave file is already mixed). You can also do such in a two-step process (there are free stem separators out there)... separate stems, edit via spectrogram in a DAW, then re-assemble in the DAW. A caution with stem separation though, they often leave residual frequencies in one stem belonging to another, so isolating a stem to be "pristine" may require a lot more effort than you bargained for.

Thanks, and sorry for the delay! Actually, what I want to identify is the area of conflict between the narrator's speech and the soundtrack playing in that scene, making it difficult to understand what's being said! I imagine I can pinpoint certain conflicting frequencies so I can apply appropriate equalization or filtering. Since it`s an academic text it must be very clear to print screen those moments. Thank you.

[Bass Guitar]

Very out there but it might be worth a try is Melodyne Studio. 
Ive used it for guitar parts to remove unwanted harmonic content. 
Im thinking that if you just highlight the short section where there is a problem you might be able to actually see it. Simply delete the unwanted blobs or use the amplitude tool and turn them down. 
 

Second option that is also way out there is use Stem Separation which should put the narrative in the Vocal track and the background music in the other tracks. Simply remix it. 

Edited 17 hours ago by Bass Guitar

[Amberwolf]

3 hours ago, carlo said:

 Actually, what I want to identify is the area of conflict between the narrator's speech and the soundtrack playing in that scene, making it difficult to understand what's being said! I imagine I can pinpoint certain conflicting frequencies so I can apply appropriate equalization or filtering.

FWIW, speaking voices generally use a fairly narrow range, around 2khz to 4khz, for their primary information content.  Most of the time you can automate a simple EQ with a single band and adjustable Q factor on hte soundtrack track or bus to "duck" the soundtrack in that frequency band during the sections the narrator is speaking, and gradually go back to normal when they're not. 

 There are other frequencies down around 80–200hz and/or 160–260hz depending on the speaker that can conflict, too, but they don't usually cause problems understanding the speech. 

(the actual frequency range varies based on the speaker, but quite often the "telephone" setting in an EQ will have a useful range already in it, you just have to flip the gains on the bands so that it is ducking that range and leaving the rest alone, instead of ducking the rest and leaving just that).  

 

 

Or even less complex, you can use a simple compressor like the Core compressor in Duck mode on the soundtrack track or bus, with it's sidechain input fed from the vocal bus, to automatically reduce the gain of the sountrack whenever the narrator is speaking.   With this, the only parts you usually have to adjust are the attack / decay and the gain. 

 

This is much simpler than analysing the tracks to find their conflicts, and generally works perfectly well.

 

[mettelus]

10 hours ago, carlo said:

Thanks, and sorry for the delay! Actually, what I want to identify is the area of conflict between the narrator's speech and the soundtrack playing in that scene, making it difficult to understand what's being said! I imagine I can pinpoint certain conflicting frequencies so I can apply appropriate equalization or filtering. Since it`s an academic text it must be very clear to print screen those moments. Thank you.

I bold-faced terms so you can Google and read up on them below.

Okay, now I have a clearer picture. What you are seeking is something to visually see frequency collisions, and then apply mirror EQ techniques to accommodate that. While SPAN will identify frequency collisions, it is a little clunky, so I use MeldaProductions MMultiAnalyzer for this (it goes on sale for 50% off regularly, especially Black Friday, and you can get $10 more off your first purchase if you sign up for Melda's newsletter).

However... having said that, I would rather recommend a process called ducking audio for what you are trying to achieve. It is the same process used by radios/documentary TV for years. Basically you put and Compressor that will accept a side-chain input (Sonitus is one of them) on your main track, and feed the vocal track into the side-chain (via a send, post fader). What that does is makes the compressor's threshold trigger from the send (not the track it is sitting on), so when the vocal is speaking, you can compress (aka, "duck") the backing track 2-3dB, so that the vocal is clear to the listener. A psycho-acoustic phenomenon called frequency masking is your friend here.... that is where sounds at the same frequency are drowned out by the louder one (and only needs to be 2-3dB, nothing egregious).

This video is more an FYI, but covers a lot of ground on mixing techniques in 10 minutes, especially methods to identify collisions with a parametric EQ ("frequency microscope") and common mirror EQ techniques (which you can do with most any parametric EQ). Again, in your specific case I would recommend using ducking instead (it is more universal, and you have one track you want to be heard without worry for "making it fit," as it were).

 

Edited 7 hours ago by mettelus