Talk:Nyquist Basics: The Audacity Nyquist Prompt

To Gale Andrews and Edgar: Unfortunately, the latest Nyquist Prompt will see both "Hello" and hello as attempts to write SAL because there is no leading paren. I knew when I wrote that rule that someone would try to evaluate a simple Lisp expression and it would break, but that's what the NyquistIDE does as well, and it rarely causes problems. The images, however, no longer portray what will be displayed. You would have to type return "Hello" or something like (string "Hello") to make the examples work. You could also write just "Hello" or Hello but both would create new error messages.

Are these from Windows? I can try to run the examples and get new image files to replace these.

---

To Gale Andrews: The link to the Nyquist 2.37 manual is STILL THE SAME HTML LINK as to the Nyquist 2.36 manual before. I have only changed the writing on the Wiki page from "Nyquist 2.36" to "Nyquist 2.37". So the good news is: there is no need to update other links on the Audacity homepage etc.

Thanks for explaining the link remains the same. I naturally did make the small change on as it would be now be incorrect/confusing to call the manual "2.36". Unfortunately someone had got to that page and marked it up with arrows and equals marks - what was there is now at. If the change was made by you or someone working on the German forum, can you tell me what was trying to be said, so that it can be made clear? Anything other than the most trivial change on the main site (and strictly, not even that) should be done by committing the file to CVS, not merely changing the file on the server, because then the file in the server and CVS are out of step.

Thanks

Gale

Edgar: As written in the "changes" comment: I unfortunately don't know who had done this.

---

Old: how can I delete a picture file no longer needed from the wiki? The picture is:

You need sysop privileges to delete files - you then see a Delete tab on all pages where you can go to do the necessary. I've deleted the file now. I can make you a sysop if you wish.

Edgar: Thanks, but I think I just simply will try to be more careful in the future. The rest of the pages are not-so overloaded with screenshots. If problems like this will happen more often in the future we can think about a second time.

I'll take a look at your modified page a bit later. Thanks for sticking at it.

Edgar: don't hurry. As you probably have noticed it's also me myself who does not necessarily have time 24 hours per day to write documentation. Somtimes it goes radically fast (like the night where I had cleaned up the plugin download page), on other times I'm away for several days with no further notice. Please don't worry: I will not run away.

Also finding bugs in Audacity 1.4 and writing the users manual is more important than the Nyquist programming pages here.

Do you happen to know the German user here "Master of pausbacken"? He has written a good but *very* long article Improving and Remastering Audio‎ and he wanted me to edit it for language or length. It took me a long time before I started to look and even now I have only done half of one of the two pages. I notified him on his talk page but I wanted to be sure he does not think I have forgotten....

Edgar: I don't think I know him (at least not under this name) and the second problem is that he writes about things I usually have nothing to do with. If I listen e.g. to a microphone recording thinking: "This would probably need some noise reduction" than even thinking such things makes me know that I have to change either the microphone, the preamp or the recording machine but I will never use the noise reduction effect because it will destroy my recording (this is with ALL noise reduction systems, not only with Audacity. The Audacity noise reduction works pretty well for a NR system, BTW).

I will read his article but will probably be no big help.

- edgar

____

'''Old: Important: Please do NOT link to the Nyquist manual on the CMU homepage! The official Nyquist 3.0 Manual on the CMU homepage is incompatible to the Nyquist implementation in Audacity!Maybe a mistake by me myself, nevertheless important to keep in mind.

You did add that link yourself according to the page histories. I also now removed it from the first page you put it on (Nyquist Audio Programming).

Edgar: I've added better explanation about the different manual versions.

Old: What I really would like to write is: Absolute superfluous and unnecessary things you have to do only because the rather idiotic idea to make the Nyquist prompt become inacessible if there is no audio track existent. But I have changed it to "Setting up" instead.

Two points: 1) Why not mention the Nyquist Generate Prompt that does not depend on an audio track? 2) Don't forget that by default in 1.3.4, no selection of track is necessary if there is a track on the screen - effect menu will be accessible and clicking an effect will "select all".

Edgar: 1.) There is no "Nyquist generate prompt" with my 1.3.4-beta here. 2.) Oh, that's new, I didn't know but just tried and you are right, it works exacly as you have written.

Old: "small snippets" is testing Nyquist code for building an plugin. An "audio hack" is: if the built-in Audacity "Effects" fail (as much too often), I open the Nyquist prompt and do it myself. Just change the line to anything else if nobody can understand this. :)

Which effects fail and how, any of them (so you do it in a Nyquist way), or only the Nyquist effects?

Edgar: This needs some extra pages to explain, mainly the Compressor still is highly misfunctional.

I changed the intro. to be (I hope) a little more understandable.

Edgar: thanks, that's much better.

In Create a Stereo Track, step 1 should not be needed as the track is selected upon generating a mono tone in the previous step. It depends on the Audacity Version and OS you work on. I agree, it should not be necessary, but probably I had to explain it too often in the past. I will first test on Windows, Linux and Mac again before deleting it.

If it does not work for the latest Beta version on any OS, please let me know.

Edgar: I've just changed the whole "Generate stereo track" section, I hope it's better now.

---

Steve: The "Applying a DC offset to a signal" and "Modulating with a carrier frequency" examples in the "Simple Examples" section are possibly not a good example as they relate to a rather unusual case of manipulating IR signals. As it is such a specialist case the illustrations are not representative of what a new user experimenting with Nyquist is likely to see.

Would it be better to remove this example and have a separate page for "Simple Examples" so that commonly used (simple) examples can be listed in the page contents?

Perhaps the "Simple Examples" could include: High-pass filter, Low-pass filter, Notch filter, Combining (nesting) filters, Generating a tone, Generate silence, Amplify, Normalize, Normalize stereo....

[Update] I see this more or less the approach on the Nyquist Audio Programming page, so the "Simple Examples" probably don't belong on this page at all.