User's Manual - Cornell Lab of Ornithology - Cornell University

Chapter 8: Preferences and OptionsPause ButtonResponsivenessWaveformDrawingWhen Canary is performing calculations that can be done in the background(computing spectrograms, spectra, correlations, and running batchprocesses), there is a tradeoff between computation speed and theresponsiveness of the machine in interacting with the user. Depending onwhether you select Pause Button Faster, Computations Faster, or No PauseButton, Canary allows more or less time for tasks other than backgroundcomputation. This choice affects the responsiveness of the machine to all userinteraction (not just clicking the Pause button), and the speed of any otherapplications that are running at the same time as Canary. If you select NoPause Button, you will not be able to do anything with the Macintoshwhile Canary is performing computations.Canary draws waveforms by drawing straight lines between points on thescreen that represent successive samples in a digitized sound. If Bestwaveform drawing is selected, every point in the digitized signal is used todraw the waveform. If Faster or Fastest is selected, Canary skips somepoints, which speeds up the drawing process at the expense of precision.Although very sharp, brief peaks in the waveform may be missed in Fastestmode, in practice the waveforms drawn in Best and Fastest modes are oftenindistinguishable from each other. You should experiment with the drawingmodes to see how they affect the appearance of the signals that you workwith. The speed difference between Best and Fastest modes is mostapparent with long signals on slow machines.General optionsSelecting General... from the Options menu brings up the General Optionsdialog box (Figure 8.6), which lets you specify whether Canary should displayan Open File dialog when the program first starts up, and what action Canaryshould take regarding changes to the current preference file when quitting.The options that you select remain in effect until you change them, load a newpreference file, or quit Canary.130 Canary 1.2 User’s Manual