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I have to admit, when I first started using SONAR 5, I was a little annoyed at the new little green and red flags that kept popping up in every track during playback, obscuring my view of the waveforms. But that was before I realized what they did.
Called Peak Markers, these little flags mark the precise location of any signal peaks in an audio track, and I've come to rely on them as a mixing and editing aid. By default, the peak markers are green for signals below 0 dB and red for signals that exceed 0 dB (digital distortion) -- although different colors can be chosen if desired.
The Peak Markers trail along behind the playhead until a significant peak is detected, and remain in that place until another peak is registered. That makes it easy to find any trouble spots in a track and deal with them, which can be done with a surgical volume envelope.
Here's a quick look at how this works.
Figure 1 shows an acoustic guitar track with a green peak marker indicating -7.6 dB. The waveform looks pretty good going forward, but at the far right hand side, a potential trouble spot looms like an iceberg.
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| Figure 1 |
Sure enough, when the playhead reaches that point, a red flag goes up, showing a 1.2 dB peak (Figure 2).
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| Figure 2 |
Since the peak marker appears at the exact point of the peak, it covers it up, making it hard to see. So, the first thing to do is to hide the peak marker, which is done by right-clicking on the track header and unchecking Show Peak Marker (Figure 3). This is also how you turn the Peak Markers off for all channels if you just don't want to see them.
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| Figure 3 |
The next step is to create a volume envelope to lower the volume right where the peak is. To do this, right click on the track, and select Envelopes>Create Clip Envelope>Gain (Figure 4).
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| Figure 4 |
Control Nodes can be added to the horizontal blue envelope line either individually or in a group of four. Figure 5 below shows a zoomed in view of the peak. With this area highlighted, four nodes can be added at once by right-clicking on the envelope and choosing Add Nodes at Selection.
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| Figure 5 |
Now when the section is played back, the peak markers show -0.3 dB at that point (Figure 6), because I lowered the volume by -1.5 dB from the original 1.2 dB peak. You wouldn't want an entire track to be that hot, but a momentary -0.3 peak will not be a problem.
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| Figure 6 |
Admittedly, the Peak Markers function is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. But the little things add up, and SONAR 5 introduced dozens of such conveniences. When taken together, they substantially streamline mixing and editing tasks, producing faster and better results overall.
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