What's new in REW V5.40

V5.40 adds a new measurement method, Fast Subband Adaptive Filtering (FSAF); an API; measurement groups; replaces the measurement list with a new version that better supports drag and drop and offers multiple selection, cut and paste keyboard shortcuts and filtering; replaces Actions panels by measurement and graph right click menus; and adds a 3D view for waterfalls and spectrograms. The Java runtime has been updated to Java 17.

Pro version

Added a tool for calculation of speech transmission index by the indirect method per IEC 60268-16:2020
Multi-input capture has options to align the individual measurements to the first input's measurement using cross correlation alignment and to vector average the individual measurements

API

Added: An API accessible over http at localhost (127.0.0.1), the default port is 4735.

Measurement

Added: Measurement with arbitrary stimuli (including music and noise) using the Fast Subband Adaptive Filtering process developed by Michael Tsiroulnikov aka Michael Zrull.
Added: A ramped levels measurement mode to make a series of measurements over a range of stimulus levels

Other measurement-related changes include:

Added: Output level can be appended to the measurement name
Added: Low input level warning messages can be disabled by not selecting "Warn if input levels are low" on the Measure dialog
High distortion and low SNR warning messages can be disabled on the Measure dialog
Changed: Longer measurement names are allowed, but the name will be truncated if necessary in graph legends
Changed: SPL log includes the rolling Leq figure in the Leq trace name and file header if rolling is selected
Changed: Stepped IMD distortion with the X axis set to "Input" is plotted against the input rms level rather than the IMD reference tone level as previously
Changed: Frequency-dependent windows are used to reduce the noise floor of sweep distortion measurements, preventing the noise floor rising with frequency

Audio interface

Added: Virtual balanced input on the Soundcard preferences has a sum/diff mode selection to control whether the balanced input is added or subtracted
Changed: Sample format info in the status bar includes the buffer size when using ASIO
Changed: Java output channel mapping supports up to 24 channels

EQ

Added: Sonance/Blaze equaliser entry
Added: ESX Audio equaliser entries
Added: Musway equaliser entries
Added: Support for Q-SYS biquad coefficient format when saving generic equaliser coefficients to file
Added: There is an "EQ only" StormAudio equaliser entry that has 20 filters, but no crossover filters
Added: The EQ window filter adjust graph has an action to copy filters from another measurement
Added: The filter adjust graph has an option to choose whether the filter settings are shown when editing filters graphically
Changed: StormAudio equaliser limits and filter types updated
Changed: Do not show message for changes in configurable equaliser settings
Changed: Use stochastic optimiser for configurable equalisers with frequency step 1 Hz or greater
Changed: Draw filter responses relative to the total target response level at 1 kHz rather than relative to the target level figure
Changed: Equalisers that run at the rate of the measurement (e.g. Generic) will default to the REW sample rate when no measurements are loaded

Impulse responses

Added: There is a multi-time window option for impulse responses, whose width is specified at octave centre frequencies
Added: Left and right window positions can be set by clicking in the area above the impulse graph
Added: "Show reflection limits" option for the Impulse and Filtered IR graphs to overlay the thresholds for the audible effects of a single lateral reflection in an anechoic space (Olive & Toole, 1989)
Changed: Offset t=0 window for overlays has "Apply & prev" and "Apply & next" buttons to step through the measurements
Changed: The IACC calculation window is called up from the Tools menu

All SPL graph and its tools

Added: A measurement can be set as a reference for other selected measurements on the All SPL and Overlay SPL graphs
Added: The alignment tool has controls to set the allowed delay range
Added: Alignment tool in phase alignment mode has a check box for whether the summed phase trace should be shown
Added: The alignment tool has an option to remove any common time delay between the measurements being aligned so that the first IR starts at t=0, this may reduce phase wraps
Added: Vector sum action in All SPL graph to add multiple measurements
Added: Some arithmetic operations have an option to control whether the result should span the overlapping frequency range of the traces or their combined range (which is the default)
Added: All SPL measurement right click menu has an action to make a measurement the current selection for individual graphs
Added: All SPL measurement list has a button to sort the measurements alphabetically by name
Changed: Cross corr align improved for measurements with strong reflections
Changed: Alignment tool phase alignment emphasises phase match nearer to the alignment frequency
Changed: Alignment tool phase alignment uses a 1/2 octave span either side of the alignment frequency
Changed: Trace arithmetic division uses a maximum gain figure instead of a regularisation figure
Changed: Gain limiting for trace arithmetic division and inversion can be disabled by deselecting the Max gain checkbox
Changed: For division with frequency limits the target outside the limits is unity gain and zero phase
Changed: Response copies include the distortion data of the source

Spectrogram and Waterfall

Added: 3D view for waterfall and spectrogram
Added: The spectrogram contour intervals include 3 and 6 dB options
Added: The waterfall can be normalised to the peak at each frequency
Added: Waterfall and spectrogram have an "Apply settings to all" button to replicate settings to other measurements
Added: Burst decay waterfall and spectrogram plots have more octave fraction choices

Overlays window

Added: Level and Linearity overlay plots for stepped level measurements
Added: Overlay SPL, Prediced SPL and Distortion have a button to view sets of measurements as a 3D surface
Added: Offset t=0 for a measurement on impulse overlay shifts the trace live as well as showing the phase impact
Added: Overlay graph trace options include measurement name
Added: Show a message on the distortion overlay graph if the measurement selections do not have the chosen distortion measure
Added: Overlay window measurement list has a button to sort the measurements alphabetically by name
Added: The right click menu for overlay graph measurements has a "Copy selections info to clipboard" action
Changed: Overlays have a new way of selecting what measurements appear on them, a condensed version of the new measurements list
Changed: When an mdat file is loaded the overlays selections it had when saved will be restored

Signal generator

Added: Signal generator has a musical note selector
Added: The generator can produce uncorrelated noise signals
Added: The generator can produce Gaussian noise signals
Added: Signal generator Speech noise signal per IEC 60268-16:2020
Added: The jitter test signal can be chosen as 16-bit or 24-bit
Changed: The repeat interval for the CEA-2010 burst matches the RTA FFT length (with a minimum of 1 second)
Changed: Increased voltage presets on FS sine Vrms field to 8

SPL meter

Added: The SPL meter can show SPL, Leq and SEL at the same time with independent weighting for each
Fixed: Clicking Calibrate on the SPL meter with a calibrated UMIK on macOS would request a cal file when it should say cal is not required

RTA

Added: Stepped sine measurement has a THD vs frequency & level option to make a series of stepped THD vs frequency measurements over a range of signal levels
Added: The RTA distortion settings have a Cross correlation averaging option to reduce input noise when measuring a signal that is connected to both the measurement and reference inputs
Added: Stereo WAV files dropped on the RTA can be processed using cross correlation averaging
Added: The RTA has a peak finder to identify peaks in the spectrum
Added: RTA has an option in the graph controls to stop the generator when the RTA stops
Added: Amplitude correction for the RTA ENOB figure can be turned off in the distortion settings
Added: The appearance settings have an option to overlay the hearing threshold if the Y axis is SPL
Added: The distortion settings have a "Show note name" option to label the fundamental with the corresponding musical note
Added: RTA multi-input capture shows individual peak traces for the first two inputs
Changed: RTA max SPL limits for CEA-2010 burst can be either CEA 2010 (2006), CTA-2010-B or CTA-2034-B
Changed: Custom two-tone signals with a 4:1 amplitude ratio are treated as modulation distortion measurements for the purpose of deciding the frequencies for d3, d4 and d5
Changed: Increased voltage presets on FS sine Vrms field to 8
Changed: RTA option to stop at a number of averages can be used with file data
Changed: Revised the calculation of harmonic levels for harmonics close to the noise floor to reduce the noise contribution
Changed: The control for the ref resistance for power figures has moved to the RTA toolbar for faster access

Scope

Scope has a Save button that saves the visible portion of the current traces as measurements

RT60 graphs

Added: Option to overlay the EBU RT60 limits on the individual and overlays RT60 graphs
Added: Control for the nominal RT60 value for the EBU limits overlay
Added: Overlay RT60 graph has a "Copy the average to the clipboard" action
Added: Show a warning if the Analysis preferences IR truncation setting is too short for accurate RT60 results
Changed: The RT60 decay upper graph has the same SPL span and time span as the waterfall below, with a small additional margin
Changed: Allow Topt to show an RT60 result even if the decay within the span is small. This may salvage some data from measurements made with the Analysis IR truncation preference set too short for the space being measured.

Data import and export

Added: Support for importing Flac and MP3 files
Added: Support for importing lspCAD convolution impulse .txt and emulator impulse .txt files
Added: IR text export header includes the data offset figure, that offset will be used if the file is later imported
Added: Audio Science Review SPL Vertical.txt and SPL Horizontal.txt measurement results can be imported
Added: The Captured graph has options in the right click menu to export the stimulus, captured or reference signals as WAV files
Added: Dropped files with a header line containing "freq" and "ohm" are treated as impedance data
Changed: If the Ctrl key is held while dragging WAV, AIFF, Flac or MP3 files onto the main REW window they will be treated as audio imports instead of IR imports
Changed: Imported text files that are impedance data exported from REW or data exported from DATS are treated as impedance data when dragged and dropped onto REW
Changed: Sorting the names of imported files uses alphanumeric comparison instead of lexicographic

Preferences

Added: View preferences has a "Use large icons" option in the Graph section to facilitate touch screen use
Added: View preferences to show notes on the measurement panels and overlay measurement panels and choose how many lines of notes to show
Added: There are View preferences to set the tuning frequency for musical notes (default is 440 Hz) and choose the octave notation style
Added: View preferences has a watermark opacity control
Changed: Right press to pan can be turned off in the View preferences
Changed: When the "Enable mousewheel zoom" View preference is not selected the mouse wheel may still be used to zoom by scrolling on the axes

Interface

There are a variety of additions and changes to the user interface:

Added: UI text has been extracted to properties files in a "bundles" folder allowing other languages to be supported
Changed: Replaced the measurement list with a new version that better supports drag and drop and offers multiple selection, cut and paste keyboard shortcuts (when the list has focus) and filtering
Changed: Actions panels have been replaced by right click menus for graphs for quicker access to the actions
Added: Measurements can be grouped
Added: Toolbar icon for trace arithmetic
Added: The top of the impulse response graph magnitude plot can be set manually or automatically
Added: There is a checkbox in the SPL & Phase graph controls to select whether or not to show the component model overlay on impedance traces
Added: Ctrl+TAB and Ctrl+Shift+TAB can be used to navigate through the measurements right click panel fields and then the list of measurements
Added: The SPL & Phase graph has an option to show the musical note corresponding to the cursor frequency
Added: Clicking on the Max SPL figure at the bottom of the main REW window will open the cal settings panel for the input
Added: Show full path for entries in recently used files list as tooltips
Added: Prevent users from saving files to the REW temp folder
Added: A custom clarity trace with a control to set the division between early and late time in the graph controls
Added: The full scale input voltage, full scale output voltage and ref resistance for a measurement can be edited on the Info dialog
Added Graph image captures have an option to add a line border
Added: SPL & Phase graph has an option to label the distortion components for RTA spectrum captures
Added: The View preferences have a "Frequency band style" entry to choose a musical or Bark scale
Added: The main window status bar shows the FS sine Vrms in and FS sine Vrms out values, they can be clicked to change them
Changed: Graph image captures do not include check boxes and only include values if the option to include the cursor is selected
Changed: Graph image captures remember the comment entered for the next use of the dialog
Changed: Left press and hold can be used to move the graph when using large graph icons
Changed: Restore windows to the screen they were last on
Changed: Voltage axis can go up to 1000 V
Changed: Room simulator allows sources to be placed with their acoustic centres flush with room surfaces
Changed: Thiele-Small parameters "Write parameters to file" includes simplified model parameters
Changed: When Thiele-Small parameters free air measurement is selected clear any secondary measurement selections
Changed: Trace separation offsets traces upwards instead of downwards to allow use with impedance traces
Changed: The widths of the legend panel entries adapt to accommodate the longest measurement name
Changed: Graph axis select and frequency span buttons are translucent
Added: The main window status bar shows the FS sine Vrms in, FS sine Vrms out and dBW ref resistance values, they can be clicked to change them
Added: The View preferences show/hide options has a new entry "Show measurement index on thumbnails", selected by default. If this is turned off the index appears in front of the name instead, which speeds up list changes when working with large numbers of measurements as the thumbnails do not need to be regenerated
Added: Phase graph controls have options to set frequency limits for the phase traces

Bug fixes

Finally, there are a number of bug fixes:

Fixed: Preserve relative timing for multi-input captures made without a timing ref maintains the chosen t=0 reference
Fixed: Stepped sine THD results were limited to the 9th harmonic even if data was captured up to 50th harmonic
Fixed: The Remove all confirmation could get stuck behind other windows
Fixed: Index out of bounds for some stepped sine test settings
Fixed: Prefix meas name with output did not show secondary ASIO output
Fixed: Disabled filters were included in Kali Santa Monica exported files
Fixed: CEA thresholds overlay for saved CEA2010 measurements was drawn based on generator frequency instead of the saved data frequency
Fixed: The native file dialog on macOS did not pre-populate save dialogs with the default filename
Fixed: Align SPL dialog did not retain the choice of using fixed dB or average level when next used
Fixed: Trace arithmetic results which do not have an impulse response could have partially unwrapped phase
Fixed: Graph capture legend labels could show incorrect smoothing
Fixed: Temporary copies of measurements might have incomplete distortion data
Fixed: The bottom axis limit setting for the impedance & phase graph could not be raised from 0 using the spinner buttons when using log impedance axis
Fixed: ARTA .pir import was not working properly
Fixed: The LFE end frequency could be applied when measuring from file
Fixed: The Impulse graph ETC smoothing spinner did not update when switching between measurements
Fixed: The result of an alignment tool sum could have its peak at the end of the IR if the alignment delay placed it before the start times of the aligned responses
Fixed: Predicted phase for imported measurements did not update when filters were changed
Fixed: EQ target match optimiser did not properly manage Q limits for equalisers using classic Q
Fixed: Unintentional scroll events from finger movement on Apple magic mouse dismissed popups
Fixed: Spectrograms for imported audio data may not have started at t=0
Fixed: Impulse response import did not use the Analysis preferences default width for the left window
Fixed: RTA was not correctly processing multi-channel WAV files
Fixed: RMS+phase and dB+phase averages of measurements whose IRs start at 0 seconds had left window set to zero
Fixed: Filter panel gain spinner buttons stopped working for negative gains in Macedonian locale
Fixed: Generating EQ for measurements with differing configurable equaliser settings could cause exceptions
Fixed: Selecting an ASIO driver did not update the soundcard cal choice
Fixed: Peak of rms + phase average IR could end up in the wrong place
Fixed: Alignment tool did not use correct phase data if measurements being aligned had FDW
Fixed: Watermark Y position was wrong on graphs that had two graph views
Fixed: Magnitude plot cursor position was incorrect on image captures of the Impulse graph
Fixed: "Measure with these filters" caused an exception if there had not been any previous measurements
Fixed: Window resizing limits were based on the display used on startup rather than the current display for the window
Fixed: Sample rate was only shown in the status bar when it changed
Fixed: Index out of bounds when saving an RTA peak measurement with multiple inputs and group averages enabled
Fixed: Some WAV files could not be opened correctly if the file length did not match the WAV specification
Fixed: Graph smoothing shortcuts on macOS did not work properly
Fixed: Phase wraps may not be shown correctly on the predicted phase trace
Fixed: Default smoothing was not applied to the group delay of new measurements
Fixed: On Linux interfaces could be opened with too many channels if they declared a very high maximum channel count
Fixed: Input cal data panel could appear behind the Measure dialog
Fixed: A stepped sine measurement that was stopped due to excessive clipping would cause an exception
Fixed: Allow graphical filter edit with a house curve that has an offset
Fixed: Impedance cal measurements did not properly override measurement sweep frequency range
Fixed: Impedance measurement noise filters were not being applied
Fixed: Graph x axis frequency presets did not work properly if the chosen end frequency was too far beyond the range of the loaded measurements
Fixed: Trim IR to windows could prepend zero-valued data to the trimmed IR
Fixed: Producing a minimum phase response from an imported data file could generate an index out of bounds exception
Fixed: ENOB calculation gave results 0.5 bits higher than they should be
Fixed: Trace arithmetic on responses whose IR start times were greater than zero and whose windowed IRs had little or no overlap in time would produce an error
Fixed: Filter text export for LSQ and HSQ shelf filters had incorrect Q values
Fixed: Selecting dBr as the Y axis on the SPL & Phase graph for a saved RTA measurement was not handled correctly
Fixed: On macOS and Linux spinners might not commit their edits on loss of focus
Fixed: NPE would occur if the EQ window was opened with no measurement loaded and the filter adjust graph Y axis was dBr
Fixed: The t=0 offset phase preview smoothing behaviour did not match the measurement phase smoothing
Fixed: Calculate target level would not adjust the target by more than 100 dB from the current value
Fixed: Stepped sine THD measurements should base the fundamental frequency on the test frequency
Fixed: Stepped level measurement X axis limits were set incorrectly on the SPL & Phase graph
Fixed: Sequential channels selection panel on the Measure dialog was limited to 4 rows
Fixed: The d&b tuning filters equaliser entry used classic Q definition, should be symmetric Q definition
Fixed: Moving selected items in the room simulator using the arrow keys did not update the time delay values
Fixed: Impedance measurement level check did not work properly
Fixed: Serial number detection was not working for EARS cal files
Fixed: Setting a toneburst with a burst length longer than the burst period caused an error
Fixed: Stepped IMD plots used total input RMS as the reference level for dBr and percent instead of the relevant reference for the IMD measure
Fixed: The measurement name preview on the Measure dialog did not enforce the name length limit, name preview now turns red if name is too long and will be truncated
Fixed: Poor EQ target match when overall gain was allowed, caused by a fix for handling Q limits for classic Q in 5.31.2
Fixed: |A|/|B| gave incorrect results when using regularisation
Fixed: Group delay plots were incorrect when the IR peak was offset from t = 0 by more than a few ms
Fixed: Burst decay spectrogram could have a divide by zero error with short IR windows

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