Glossary
This glossary is an editorial index, not a generated term dump. Start with the grouped guides below, then follow the related links inside each page when you need implementation detail.
New to audio analysis?
Read Audio Basics first, then MIR Overview. If you are here for the mastering demo, start with What Is Mastering?.
Foundations
These pages cover the signal and analysis concepts that recur across the API, CLI, WASM, and browser demos.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Audio Basics | Sample rate, bit depth, mono/stereo, amplitude, dB, clipping, headroom, and latency. |
| MIR Overview | BPM, beats, onsets, key, chords, chroma, FFT, STFT, spectrograms, MFCC, CQT, VQT, HPSS, pitch, and sections. |
| Mixing Basics | Tracks, stems, trim, fader, pan, stereo width, mute, solo, polarity, headroom, and bouncing. |
| Editing Basics | Pitch vs time, semitones and cents, MIDI note numbers, formant, and samples vs seconds. |
| Browser Local Processing | What stays local in the browser mastering demo, what still loads from the network, and the tradeoffs of local WASM processing. |
Analysis Guides
These pages expand the MIR terms used by the analyzer, realtime views, and feature-extraction APIs.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Spectrogram and STFT | FFT, STFT windows, nFft, hopLength, spectrograms, CQT, and VQT. |
| Onset Detection | Onsets, transients, onset-strength envelopes, and why tempo starts there. |
| Tempo and BPM | BPM estimation, tempograms, autocorrelation, confidence, and half/double-tempo ambiguity. |
| Beats and Downbeats | Beat tracking, dynamic programming, meter phase, and downbeat estimation. |
| Chroma Features | Pitch classes, chromagrams, and why chroma powers key/chord analysis. |
| Key Detection | Chroma-profile key estimation, candidate keys, profile families, and confidence. |
| Chord Recognition | Chord templates, beat-synchronous chroma, smoothing, HMM options, and segment confidence. |
| Mel, MFCC, and Timbre | Mel scaling, MFCCs, spectral centroid, flatness, and timbre descriptors. |
| Melody and Pitch | F0, YIN, pYIN, monophonic pitch tracking, voicing, and melody contours. |
| Section and Structure | Boundary detection, self-similarity, repetition, energy, and section labels. |
Mixing Guides
These pages expand the mixing-engine terms — the channel strip, routing, image, and metering — used by the Mixing Engine guide.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Channel Strip | The fixed strip signal order and why it decides what each control does. |
| Buses and Sends | Master/aux/submix roles, pre/post-fader sends, FX buses, and VCA groups. |
| Pan and Stereo Width | Pan modes, pan law, and stereo width vs mono compatibility. |
| Automation and Metering | Automation curves, goniometer, correlation, and true-peak metering. |
Editing Guides
These pages expand the editing-DSP terms behind the Editing DSP guide.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Time Stretch and Pitch Shift | Phase vocoder, resampling, the time/pitch trade, and artifacts. |
| Pitch Correction and Note Editing | MIDI-targeted correction, note regions, and sample-accurate edits. |
| Voice and Formant | Formants, the vocal tract, and pitch vs formant independence. |
Instruments and MIDI
These pages explain how libsonare turns MIDI into sound — the built-in NativeSynth, the SoundFont player, and the MIDI vocabulary they share.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Synthesis Basics | Oscillators, filters, and the synthesis families NativeSynth uses: subtractive, FM, physical modeling, modal, and additive. |
| Envelopes and Modulation | ADSR envelopes, LFOs, velocity, key tracking, and the mod matrix. |
| MIDI Basics | Notes, velocity, channels, CC, program change, banks, General MIDI, pitch bend, and MIDI 2.0. |
| SoundFont and Sampled Instruments | Sampled vs synthesized sound, SF2 banks and programs, and the General MIDI fallback. |
Arrangement and Projects
These pages expand the headless-DAW terms used by Project Editing, Recording and Takes, and Project Bounce.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Clips and Tracks | The project model: tracks, clips, the timeline, MIDI destinations, and clip edits. |
| Takes and Comping | Multiple recorded takes in a clip, the active take, comp segments, and loop recording. |
| Warp and Tempo Sync | Warp modes, anchors, tempo maps, time signatures, and pitch-preserving stretch. |
| Bounce and Rendering | Rendering an arrangement to audio, the mixer scene, instrument bounces, and latency compensation. |
Realtime Guides
These pages expand the realtime/streaming terms used by StreamAnalyzer, the RealtimeEngine, and the AudioWorklet path.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Streaming Analysis | Blocks, frames, hops, progressive estimates, and quantized reads. |
| Realtime Engine | Transport, clip scheduling, the metronome, and telemetry. |
| Realtime Safety | The audio-callback deadline, no-allocation/lock-free rules, and the AudioWorklet. |
Room Acoustics
These pages expand the room-acoustic terms used by the Spatial Room Scanner and the Acoustic Analysis guide — what a room's decay reveals about its size, surfaces, and the distance to a source.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Reverberation Time (RT60 and EDT) | RT60, early decay time, the T20/T30 extrapolation, and why the two measures disagree. |
| Clarity and Definition (C50, C80, D50) | Early-to-late energy ratios for speech and music, and definition as a percentage. |
| Source Distance and DRR | Direct-to-reverberant ratio, critical distance, and why one channel resolves distance but not direction. |
| Room Geometry and Volume | The equivalent shoebox, volume, and Sabine's volume/absorption trade-off. |
| Per-Band Decay and Absorption | Per-band RT60, absorption coefficients, and the high-frequency rolloff. |
| Inverse Room Estimation | Impulse-response vs blind estimation and how to read the confidence score. |
Mastering Concepts
These guides explain the listening and measurement ideas behind the mastering demo.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Mastering | The role of mastering and how loudness, tone, dynamics, stereo image, and peak safety work together. |
| What Is Mastering? | A fuller introduction to mastering as a final delivery process. |
| LUFS | Integrated loudness and common delivery targets. |
| True Peak | Inter-sample peak safety and why dBTP differs from sample peak. |
| A/B Comparison | Loudness-matched before/after listening. |
| Loudness Matching | How to compare processing decisions without louder-is-better bias. |
| Reference Track | Using a finished release as a tonal and loudness anchor. |
| True Peak Safety | Choosing ceilings that survive encoding and playback conversion. |
| Dynamic Range | Reading movement and density beyond loudness alone. |
| Crest Factor | Peak-to-average contrast and what it says about punch. |
| Mono Compatibility | Checking whether stereo width survives mono playback. |
| Gain Staging | Keeping levels sensible before, during, and after processing. |
| Air Band | High-frequency openness and why it needs restraint. |
Mastering Feature Guides
These pages group controls by how they are used in the chain. Individual parameters are intentionally not split into thin generated pages.
| Guide | Covers |
|---|---|
| Repair and Input Controls | Input gain, denoise, source clipping, and preparation before the main chain. |
| Dynamics Controls | Threshold, ratio, attack, release, knee, gain reduction, and punch. |
| Tone and Air Controls | Tilt EQ, exciter amount, air-band amount, and brightness decisions. |
| Stereo, Limiter, and Loudness Controls | Stereo width, limiter ceiling, loudness target, and final rendering. |
| Reference Match | Reference import, level matching, spectral comparison, and match strength. |
| Delivery Targets | Choosing LUFS and true-peak targets for streaming, podcast, club, and archive use. |
| Reading Mastering Meters | LUFS, peak, crest factor, correlation, phase, and stereo image together. |
| Choosing a Mastering Preset | Selecting a starting point without treating presets as finished masters. |
| Mastering Quality Checklist | A final review path before trusting an export. |
| Error Recovery | What to do when decoding, rendering, reference matching, or playback checks fail. |