WavRead 1.4.10 — Capture that knows what it is recording

Everything since 1.4.4, from real sessions rather than planning.

Capture knows what it is recording

The Bridge plugin now asks what each instance is sitting on — Track, Group (a stack or submix), Reverb bus, Delay bus, or Master — and the answer changes the analysis. A group counted beside its own children counts the same music twice; a reverb return counted as a part adds an instrument nobody played. The plugin guesses from the channel name and the selector overrides the guess.

Capture a reverb or delay return on its own bus and its decay and repeat times are measured on the effect itself rather than inferred from what is left over after the parts are subtracted from the master.

One take, one timeline

A host does not run a channel strip's plugins until that channel has audio, so instances begin recording at different points in the song. In one real 31-instance take the captures ran from 20.6 to 192.3 seconds — and every file began at sample zero, so a part that entered at 2:20 was analysed as though it opened the song. Captures now carry the transport position where they began, and are padded to a shared origin before analysis.

The same cause made a late-joining instance start a take of its own and arrive as a separate one-track analysis. Instances now keep a take alive while it records.

Takes and names

Every take was called "Session", so a second capture wrote its analysis over the first. Takes are now named from what they contain, never collide, and can be named by hand while recording. Any analysed track can also be renamed afterwards — documents, audio, markers and mix history all move together, or none of them do.

The stem table answers the question

Six new columns: level against the loudest part, reduce by to reach −6 dBTP, per-part crest, and DC offset with asymmetry — so a DC offset on the master can be traced to the part causing it, and asymmetry says why.

Also new: a housekeeping block naming dead tracks and accidental duplicates (a hard-panned stereo pair is not called a duplicate), a crowding report showing which band is carrying too many parts at once, and an arrangement grid with three states instead of one useful one.

Measurements that were wrong

• Key detection asks the chords. Naming the relative major instead of the minor tonic is key detection's most common failure, and it was proven here on a track whose chord chart was supplied. The chord detector already had it right. When confidence is low and the chords do not settle it, both readings are reported.
• Stem separation is cached against a hash of the audio, not the filename. Two different mixes bounced to the same name returned an identical stem table.
• Tempo offers the half-time reading above 140 BPM.
• Delay times say how they sit against the grid — "1/4 +7.7% — not synced" — instead of leaving the column empty whenever a delay was not exactly on a division.
• The master-bus comparison withholds itself when the master and the parts cannot be reconciled, rather than printing arithmetic on unrelated signals. A quiet master is explicitly not a reason: pulling the Stereo Out fader down is a mix decision, and the comparison level-matches before measuring.

Failing in words

A file that is not audio now says so by name instead of raising an empty error, and the frequency graph no longer disappears silently when it cannot be drawn.

Also

• How to use WavRead is a page inside the app
• Update now installs a release after checking it against the SHA-256 in these notes
• The library can live on any drive, and Settings names the audio output device in use

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WavRead-1.4.10.dmg — 237 MB
SHA-256: c48a11f37574cb74c71366e4cfa457d6e1a0e53b966bb51b3682f7f04b2577d8

Unsigned: on first launch, right-click the app and choose Open. Requires Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or later. Analysis runs entirely on your machine; nothing is uploaded and there is no account.