On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:14 AM, fons@kokkinizita.net wrote:

• The meters are there to show levels at the AD/DA converters,

i.e. to allow you to check you are using those in a sensible  way. They happen to be on the same window as the mixer, which  can be useful as they suggest to the user which signal is  being controlled by a fader. But otherwise they are not part  of the mixer, and a better place for them would be with the  HW gain controls.

The meters show the levels at the A/D&D/A's but also at other things that don't necessarily end up being routed to the analog I/O.

See the "Peak" labels on http://nielsmayer.com/envy24control/envy24mixer-architecture.png ... That's: * 10 channels of hardware peak-levels of inputs (including an SPDIF pair). * 10 channels of hardware peak-level outputs (including an SPDIF pair). * 2 channels for the digital mixer output.

So in reality (assuming reality==documentation== http://alsa.cybermirror.org/manuals/icensemble/envy24.pdf ) the peak meters are part of the mixer. However, the peak meter information is most useful in the "Analog Volume" panel, but that would miss four-six channels + spdif-pair of outputs. As a stopgap, I put the dBFS value alongside each channel, since adding the full meters to this panel was a much larger and more radical change than my initial patches.

A better design overall, IMHO would be to combine all 20 input and output faders feeding the digital-summer into a single panel. Instead of two faders per channel, just one fader and a panpot, which would normally be swung hard-left or hard-right, but should also have a detent or page-position at center mix. The panpot would also indicate inactive and set at center-mix when "L/R Gang" is selected. Each channel would have the numeric dbFS input value displayed as a "button", which when selected, expands a meter that fills the column vertically; and deselected, it goes back to being a text display of the peak levels. That mechanism of dynamically adding a meter per channel could also be used in the "Analog Volumes" section to optionally allow meter info to be displayed alongside each slider.

• The post-fader signals in the mixer are not available anywhere,

they just get summed to the bus.

They are "available" in that the output of the digital mixer is metered and that meter is always displayed in envy24control. If you want to see the resulting level of any particular channels' attenuation, "solo" it (by manually muting the other incoming channels) and observe the resulting levels under the "Digital Mixer" meters. (Actually, a "Channel Solo" option-menu would be a useful addition to the digital mixer GUI: "off", "solo left" "solo right" "solo center".

-- Niels http://nielsmayer.com