Sharing Sequences and Data for SoundCheck

Additional Resources for SoundCheck

Detailed explanations of how to use SoundCheck can be found in the SoundCheck manual.

Video Transcript: Sharing Sequences and Data for SoundCheck

Sometimes, when you’re working with sequences, you encounter unexpected behavior and it’s helpful to send your sequence to a colleague, or to Listen’s support team, for troubleshooting assistance. In this video, I’m going to show you how to save a SoundCheck sequence for troubleshooting so it’s in the right format and contains all the information and files needed for someone to help you.

I’m going to use this classic impedance sequence as an example. When I run it, the stweep plays and we see the impedance response, displayed on an X-Y graph.

But if I look at the results here, I see that the resonant frequency and resonant Q are ‘NaN’, not a number,even though the impedance response looks as expected which means there is something going on within the sequence.

When you take a look at the sequence, you can see that it has failed a bunch of steps in the sequence.

Let’s package it up and send it to Listen’s support team to see if they can help fix it.

The first thing that you need to do is to make sure you save the recordings. In this case, it is the stimulus and the recorded time waveform. These must be saved as a WFM file or a TDMS file. A WFM file is a proprietary SoundCheck file format for waveforms, which also includes the associated stimulus metadata with it. A TDMS file is a National Instruments  file format, which also includes the associated stimulus metadata.

It’s important that you do NOT save the files as a WAV file, because those don’t contain the metadata that you need for the Analysis steps when you recall and use those waveforms within the sequence.

You can save the waveforms from the memory list. Just select the items, right click, and save the data as either WFM or TDMS.

I’m going to save in WFM format and call it impedance stimulus and RTWs. In addition to these waveforms, you need to send the sequence itself.

You should do this using the “file export option” and save it to your chosen location. This ensures that any dependent files such as calibration data or recalled weighting curves or audio files that are used in your sequence are saved in the same directory. 

Now I can take my sequence and saved data, zip it up and send it to Listen Support.

Now it’s easy for anyone else to troubleshoot, even if they don’t have the device under test or even the same test hardware. They just need to use a recall step to bring the stimulus and recorded time waveforms into SoundCheck and continue troubleshooting from the analysis step onwards.