Waterfall

Waterfall

Waterfall shows the current frequency spectrum in front of a layered history. It helps reveal how resonances, harmonics, decays, and tonal balance develop over several seconds.

Spectrum emphasizes the current curve. Spectrogram represents frequency history with color. Waterfall keeps the curve shapes visible as receding ridges, which can make changing peaks easier to follow.

Add Waterfall

• Desktop: Open Settings > Modules and enable Waterfall. Its controls appear with the other scope settings. It can be resized or detached like the other analyzers.
• DAW: Insert Prism Waterfall in a supported VST3, CLAP, or macOS AU host. Open the gear button for settings.
• Terminal: Press l to edit the layout, then a to add Waterfall. The scope shortcut is 8. Press s and select Waterfall for its settings.

Existing desktop and TUI layouts do not automatically gain a Waterfall panel. Add it where it is useful and save the resulting profile.

Reading the display

The live spectrum is followed by older ridges along the same frequency axis. Guides show frequency and history time. Foreground ridges hide covered portions of older lines; a partly hidden line has not necessarily lost its underlying signal.

Theme color fades older ridges with age. Heat color uses the theme's low/mid/high level palette to distinguish quieter and louder parts of the spectrum. These are visual choices and do not change the captured audio.

History advances with incoming audio, not with the display's frame rate. When capture is suspended, history holds rather than inventing new audio. Waterfall is a visual history, not a recording: use Rolling Audio Capture when you need a WAV file.

Desktop and plugin controls

Control	Choices or range	Default	What it changes
History	1–30 seconds	5s	How much recent spectrum history is retained
Ridges	Sparse, Balanced, Dense	Balanced	Number of visible history curves, adapted to panel size
Color	Theme, Heat	Theme	Age-faded theme lines or level-based colors
FFT	1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384	2048	Frequency separation versus response time and processing cost
Scale	Log, Mel, Linear	Log	How frequencies are spaced across the display
Range	Extended, Audible	Extended	Requested frequency range, limited by the source sample rate
Guides	On/Off	On	Frequency and history-time references
Tilt	-2–8 dB/oct, 0.1 steps	2 dB/oct	Visual spectral tilt around 1 kHz; does not apply EQ
Smoothing	0–0.99, 0.01 steps	0.90	Steadiness of the spectrum before it enters history

Extended requests 10 Hz–24 kHz; Audible requests 20 Hz–20 kHz. Neither can display captured frequencies beyond half the source sample rate. See Understanding the Scopes for scale and FFT tradeoffs.

Changing Ridges changes density without shortening the selected history. A narrow panel can display fewer ridges to remain readable. A larger FFT can separate close tones, while stronger smoothing steadies them at the cost of immediate movement.

Waterfall does not expose the rotation, mirroring, pointer crosshair, or Linked Analysis controls used by some other scopes.

TUI controls

The terminal offers the same history, ridge-density, FFT, smoothing, and tilt ranges. Its labels differ slightly:

• Heat colors switches between the theme line color and the heat palette; default Off.
• Audible range selects 20 Hz–20 kHz when On; default Off selects Extended.
• Frequency scale, FFT size, and Display tilt correspond to desktop Scale, FFT, and Tilt.
• Guides defaults to On.

Use Left/Right or Enter to change a selected setting, and Backspace to reset it. Terminal cell size limits fine detail; enlarge the terminal or reduce ridge density before assuming that a hidden peak is absent from the audio. See Terminal UI for layout and profile controls.

Useful starting points

• For a general overview, start with 5 seconds, Balanced ridges, and FFT 2048.
• For short attacks, use a short history and less smoothing.
• For slowly decaying resonances, increase history and give the panel more space.
• For closely spaced tones, increase FFT size and accept slower frequency updates and more processing work.
• If the picture is crowded, try Sparse ridges before shortening the history you need.

Saved settings and troubleshooting

Desktop profiles save Waterfall's settings and layout. Plugin instances save their settings in DAW projects. TUI profiles use their separate terminal settings and layout system.

If Waterfall is absent, enable or add it; updating Prism does not replace your saved layout. If it is flat or frozen, check the selected audio source and capture status. If it draws slowly, reduce FFT size or density, enlarge the panel for readability, or lower the desktop frame target. See Troubleshooting.