Listening quality

Trellis can analyze a recording for how pleasant it is to listen to. The reading sits in the Quality pane of a recording’s Side Panel, and on the cards in the Add Recordings queue. It reads High, Medium or Low.

What goes into it

Three groups: Tone, Noise and Dynamics, each with a meter, a score, a sentence and its own readings folded underneath. They combine so the worst problem dominates.

Specific faults are deducted on top and listed under Technical Issues: clipping, a dead channel, out-of-phase content, dropouts. Source type is one input to the same reading, so soundboards, broadcasts, matrixes and audience tapes are measured on one scale.

Readings marked with an asterisk are measured and shown, and carry no weight. Its tooltip says what it measures.

A line at the top of the pane gives the format, the bit depth and sample rate, the bitrate and where the top end rolls off. The spectrogram at the foot is drawn for the track playing now, or the first track, and follows the track you click.

Re-Analyze Tracks, in the pane’s action row, re-runs the per-track pass: the waveform, the spectrogram and the raw readings.

The top of the scale

The scale is anchored to audibility. The top of it means past the point where further improvement would be heard.

Three separate marks

The letter grade is a judgment someone made by listening. The listening quality reading is measured. The star is yours, on or off.

The same reading on the Add Recordings cards is covered in sound quality.