Comments on: Sine Wave Frequency Sweep with Audacity

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 02:38:59 +0000

That’s a neat idea using fmosc to generate a sweep.
This plug-in was brought to my attention today (so your work lives on :)) by a post on the Audacity help forum. The post was by someone wanting to combine this sweep generator with a tremolo effect. You can find the result here if you are interested: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=38426

Steve

By: Sajowe

Sajowe — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:15:20 +0000

After I had just worked out how to do this log freq sweep by myself I thought I’d Google it … and well here I am. I hadn’t though of adding the level controller & now have worked out how to make is a generator rather than a process plugin.

But what I really wanted to say was just a note for the corruptness: when you copy it from the web browser into notepad the quotation marks (ie. “”) are not the proper ones. Just check to see if they are as I’ve also come across coping stuff from Web Browsers (& also MS Word) to notepad the “”s are actually a different character as such. When pasted they become directional “”s but with programming they should be the same at each end of the quote.

Here’s my version anyway (the units have been fixed up a bit too)
;nyquist plug-in
;version 1
;type generate
;name “Freq Sweep”
;action “Log Freq Sweep…”
;info “by Sajowe”

;control frest “Start freq” real “Hz” 20 5 20480
;control frefl “Final freq” real “Hz” 20480 5 20480
;control swpduration “Duration” real “sec” 20 1 300
;control level “Level (dBFS)” real “dBFS” -3 -40 0

(scale-db level (fmosc 0 (pwe 0.000001 frest swpduration frefl 5.001)))

By: Adam Pope

Adam Pope — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:31:45 +0000

Hi Austin, I would recommend downloading a better text editor. Something like Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) will allow you to save a file with arbitrary file extensions (as well as being very useful for a lot of other jobs!)

By: Austin

Austin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:16:50 +0000

hi i am trying to save the .ny file but i cannot. i am running windows vista 32 bit. i tried using notepad but it saves it as a .txt file…and i know that isnt what i want.

By: tangofish

tangofish — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:19:30 +0000

The “cut and paste code” above seems to be a bit corrupt for some reason?
After fixing it up the code is working for me now, thanks to Adam and Paul for
the good work!

;nyquist plug-in
;version 1
;type generate
;name “Frequency Sweep…”
;action “Producing frequency sweep…”
;info “version 1.2 by Adam Pope and Paul Schimmel (fixed by tangofish)”

;control startf “Start Frequency (Hz)” real “” 20 20 20000
;control endf “End Frequency (Hz)” real “” 20000 20 20000
;control duration “Duration (secs)” real “” 30 1 300
;control level “Level (dBFS)” real ” ” 0 -40 0
;control type “Sweep scale [1=Linear, 2=Exponential]” int “” 2 1 2

(if (= type 2)(scale-db level (fmosc 0 (pwev startf duration endf))) (scale-db level (fmosc 0 (pwlv startf duration endf))) )

By: Zeb

Zeb — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:29:55 +0000

Hello Adam, thanks for writing this plugin. I’ve searched everywhere for a frequency sweep plugin and this is the only place that I’ve found info for it.

That being said, I can’t get it to work! I’ve tried both of the versions that you have posted up above and everytime I do either one I get an error chime and a widow pops up (in Audacity) that says “Nyquist returned the value: 0.00000″. I have noticed that when I change the level slider in version 2 (for example from 0.0dBFS to -3.5dBFS) the error message will say “Nyquist returned the value: -3.500000. Any idea what could be causing this?

I’m running Audacity 1.26 on Windows Vista

If I hit the debug button it gives me the same error and then pops up another window that says:

error: unbound variable – TYPE
if continued: try evaluating symbol again
Function: #
Arguments:
(= TYPE 2)
(SCALE-DB LEVEL (FMOSC 0 (PWEV STARTF DURATION ENDF)))
(SCALE-DB LEVEL (FMOSC 0 (PWLV STARTF DURATION ENDF)))
1> [ gc: total 18640, 3673 free; samples 1KB, 0KB free ]

I’m definitely not a programmer so this is greek to me! Thanks for you help!

By: Adam Pope

Adam Pope — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:38:00 +0000

Kaylea, you need to copy the code into a new file with a name like frequencysweep.ny and place it in to your Audacity plug-ins directory.

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Nyquist_Plug-ins

By: nomis

nomis — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:10:08 +0000

To get this working int he current Audacity build, just change the code so it reads on the second line version 1 instead of 3

By: kaylea

kaylea — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:54:30 +0000

i dont understand where i put the code to make it frequency sweap
can someone help please.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:05:00 +0000

Sorry Adam, you only managed to recreate Generate -> Chirp…

Better luck next time!