Mark Editor

A measurement rarely needs to be analysed from beginning to end. The interesting part is usually a run-up, a single gear shift, or the few seconds where a noise appears. The Mark Editor is where you define that section — the Mark — on the time signal, listen to it, analyse it, and write it back into the file so that every later step uses the same window.

Opening the Mark Editor

Entry point	What it does
View → Mark Editor	Activates the Mark Editor tab in the bottom dock.
Mark icon in the toolbar	Same as the menu entry: browse a source file, set the time window, commit it to the file.
Right-click a file in the data tree → Mark Editor	Opens that file directly, with the channels currently ticked in the tree pre-selected for the preview.
Put Mark Analyzer in the Destination and run the analysis	Produces a Mark Analyzer document page with the computed results, the chart grid and the playback filters.

Mark Editor and Mark Analyzer are not the same thing

The names are similar and both revolve around marks, but they play different roles:

	Mark Editor	Mark Analyzer
Form	A tool window in the bottom dock	A document page in the Destination
How you get it	Opened from the menu or toolbar, available at any time	Produced by running an analysis after adding it to the Destination
What it follows	Follows the current focus: it edits whichever file you select elsewhere	Bound to the results of its own analysis run; does not change with focus
What it is for	Defining the time window, auditioning it, committing marks to the file	Viewing the results for that segment, with playback filtering and audition on top

In short: the Mark Editor decides which segment, the Mark Analyzer produces results for it. A mark you commit is picked up by the downstream analyses, so the usual order is to define the segment in the editor first, then let the analyzer produce the plots.

The Mark Editor is a licensed add-on. If the menu entry and the toolbar button are greyed out, the module is not enabled in your licence.

Loading a Source

Source — path of the time-domain file. Type it, or use Browse… (accepts .hdf, .wav, .dpsa, .atfx).
Load from Pool — takes the first selected source from the project's source pool.
Drag and drop — drop files onto the document tab. A time-domain file becomes the source; any other analysis .hdf is added to the charts of the same document.

As soon as a source is loaded, the Mark is reset to span the whole file and the waveform appears in the preview.

The waveform always shows the complete file, decimated for display. The Mark is a window drawn on top of it, never a truncation — you keep the context around the section you selected.

Setting a Mark Manually

With Mode set to Manual, the Mark is defined by two boundaries.

Control	Function
Mark Start (s)	Start of the window, in seconds from the beginning of the file.
End (s)	End of the window, in seconds.
Apply	Applies the typed values to the charts.
Set to File Length	Resets the Mark to the whole file (start = 0, end = duration).

You can also drag the boundaries directly. Both lines are draggable on the preview and on the time-domain chart of the document tab; the charts refresh when you release the mouse button. The numeric fields and the lines are always two views of the same window.

A Mark whose start and end coincide is empty and cannot be applied, committed or played. If nothing happens after pressing Apply, check that the two values differ.

Ramp Mode

On run-up and coast-down measurements, the section of interest is defined by speed rather than by time. Switch Mode to Ramp and let the Mark Editor find it:

Enter the speed at which the ramp should start in From and where it should end in To. From < To searches for a run-up; From > To searches for a coast-down.
Press Ramp Search. The reference speed channel is scanned for every segment that traverses the requested range, and the Mark jumps to the first match.
Use ◀ Prev and Next ▶ to step through the other matches. The status text shows which segment you are on, its time span and the speed range actually covered, for example Segment 2 / 5 [12.480 – 31.220 s] (500 → 4000).

Each match sets the Mark automatically, so no separate Apply is needed. The default search range is 500 to 4000, and the reference channel is detected automatically from the channel names and units.

Status message	Meaning
Searching…	The scan is running in the background.
RPM reference channel not found	The file has no channel that can serve as a speed reference. Check that the tacho channel was recorded and is enabled.
No ramp found	No segment covers the requested range. Widen From/To, or check whether the ramp actually runs in the direction you assumed.
Failed to read source HDF / Source data unavailable	The source file could not be read; verify the path.

SPL Calibration

The calibration row defines how the stored samples relate to absolute sound pressure. It drives the dB SPL readout during playback and is stored per file, so it only has to be entered once.

Field	Meaning	Default
FS	Sound pressure level, in dB SPL peak, that corresponds to a full-scale sample value of 1.0.	114.0 dB SPL
Sens	Sensor sensitivity in mV/Pa. A typical 1/4″ microphone is about 50 mV/Pa. Enter 0 to leave it unused.	0
Gain	Gain of the upstream signal chain in dB (preamplifier and similar). 0 = none.	0

The summary text next to the fields restates the resulting reference, for example 1.0 PCM = 114.0 dB SPL peak.

Writing the Mark into the File

Commit to HDF stores the Mark window in the file header, so that any later step — an analysis run, a report, another workstation — starts from the same section.

Set the Mark and check the two values.
Press Commit to HDF.
A save dialog appears, proposing the source name with the suffix _mark. Give the section a meaningful file name here, for example gearbox_runup_2000-4000.hdf.
Confirm. Only the header is rewritten; the measurement samples are copied unchanged.

If you choose the source file itself as the target, a confirmation prompt asks whether to overwrite it. Writing to a new file is the safer habit — it keeps the original recording untouched and gives each marked section its own name.

Each Mark Editor session holds one Mark window at a time. Several sections of the same recording are handled by committing each of them to its own file, which then carries its own name and can be put in the source pool independently.

Listening to a Marked Section

The Mark defines what is played. Press Play in the Player and only the marked section is rendered and sent to the output.

Loop repeats the section automatically. It is re-rendered on every pass, so moving a Mark line or toggling a playback filter takes effect on the next repetition — this is what makes A/B listening practical.
The playhead runs along the time-domain chart during playback.
If no output device is selected, the system default speaker is used.
Playback filters apply to the rendered section; see the Playback Filters topic.

Time-Frequency Selection on a Heatmap

When the document contains a spectrogram or another heatmap, you can restrict playback in both time and frequency:

Right-click the heatmap and choose the option to select a playback region, then drag a rectangle. Holding Alt while dragging does the same without the menu.
The rectangle defines a time range and a frequency band. Playback is limited to that band.
On a heatmap with a time axis, the selection also updates the Mark boundaries.
Clear Heatmap Selection in the Player removes the region and returns to unfiltered playback of the Mark window.

This is the quickest way to answer “is that the component I can see at 1.2 kHz?” — draw a box around it on the spectrogram and listen to just that box.

Each edge of the selection can be dragged on its own: the cursor shows left/right arrows on a time edge, up/down arrows on a frequency edge, and a hand inside the box. The frequency direction is not simply “play only these frequencies” — it drives a high-pass and a low-pass filter, so what you hear is that band filtered out of the signal.

Filter Cursor

Filter Cursor on the document toolbar draws a vertical line on the spectrum at the centre frequency of each playback filter. You can drag the line to change the frequency, and the combined response curve and the spectrum preview follow it. Dragging during playback re-applies the filters immediately and continues playing, so you can drag and listen at the same time.

The three slots in the Playback Filters panel are always present — there is nothing to “add”. The Filter Cursor only decides whether they are drawn on the plot.
All three are off by default. With all of them off you see a few faint grey lines and no blue response curve — that is expected; switch one on and it appears.
For filter shapes, types and parameters see Playback Filters.

Which Plots Are Shown

The Time signal toggle on the toolbar controls whether the time-domain plot is shown. Turning it off lets the heatmap fill the page, which helps when you are concentrating on the time-frequency structure. The setting is remembered, and the time signal is never hidden when it is the only content on the page.
A heatmap can be switched to a waterfall from the colour-bar context menu (not from the plot cell context menu).

Marks and the Analysis Pipeline

The Mark Editor connects to the analysis pipeline in two directions.

Marking before analysing

Open the file in the Mark Editor, set the window, and commit it. The stored Mark is read back by the analysis chain, so the run-up, the idle phase or the event you selected is what actually gets analysed — no manual cropping and no risk of analysing a different window than the one you listened to.

Analysing into a Mark Editor tab

In the Pool, a destination node can be set to Mark Analyzer instead of Data Viewer — the two are mutually exclusive. When the pipeline runs, the results open in a new Mark Editor document tab, together with the time signal, so that the marks, the playhead, the heatmap selection and the playback filters are available directly on the results.

Additional analysis .hdf files can be dropped onto the same tab to place further charts next to the ones already there. The chart grid is arranged through the Mark Editor (document layout) properties panel, the same panel used by the Data Viewer. Right-click the chart area to copy the whole page as an image.

Tips and Notes

Committing a Mark to a new file is the cleanest way to build a set of comparable sections — same speed range, same duration, one file per test object.
In Ramp mode, use Next ▶ to check that all repetitions of a run-up were detected before analysing only the first one.
If the preview shows fewer channels than expected, check which channels are ticked for that file in the data tree — the tree selection is carried over to the preview.
Set the SPL calibration before a listening session; otherwise the dB SPL readout refers to the default full-scale value and the absolute numbers will be wrong.
The Mark window is also stored with the project, so reopening the project restores the section you were working on.