DRC GUI

From DRC

Some Ideas for the Design of GUI

Below are some ideas for a GUI (graphical user interface) for DRC.

The main inputs to the DRC data file, are basically:

• Impulse response of each speaker (could be more than two)
• Target frequency response
• Microphone frequency response (if known)
• DRC configuration parameters

And the output is a number of filters, one per channel.

So the installation of DRC will be changed to store these in a structured way. We will have the following sub directories:

/DRC
    /impulses
    /freq_targets
    /mic_targets
    /sweeps (stores the sweep files used to create the impulse response)
    /filters (output directory)

The impulse response files will have their recording data coded as part of the filename, E.G.

   Imp_10-21000_44100_Left_RME9632_Sub.pcm

We will store both the impulse response files and the raw wav files (called "Imp_" and "Sweep_").

Likewise the output filters will have a corresponding filter file generated and saved, so at a later stage we can go back and check the parameters used for a particular filter.

See below for some interface mockups:

Impulse Response Selector

Notice how we scan the impulses directory and present all the available impulses to the user, along with the information about the circumstances that the filter was created.

The purpose of this is to allow easy generation of several sweeps, perhaps taken with doors open, sub woofers on and off, etc, and then to easily pick which one to use.

Main DRC Parameters

Here we tell DRC roughly what we want it to do. Changing any of these parameters will change a huge swathe of parameters on the detail screens.

The effects of these radio buttons are all defined in the XML parameters file (see below).

Note to self: This page also needs to have the target freq response. It would be even nicer if this was a graph that the user could tweak and overlay with the current frequency response of their system

Detailed DRC Parameters

Most people should not have to go here. The main paramaters screen should be enough to set all of these to something sensible.

However, they remain available for tweaking and advanced users.

The list of parameters is dynamic and created by reading an XML parameters file. This parameters file will be supplied with the version of DRC that is installed. The parameters file basically looks like the readme.txt file does now, I.E. listing all the parameters that this version of DRC supports and their defaults. However, in addition we define "parameter sets", that get used on the main screen - something like having a default option for each parameter, and then another value if a certain radio button is clicked on the main page.

(insert example of XML file here)