Easily create high-quality test tones, scans, and audio files to check the phase of your speakers in an instant with this Mac OS X app.

What is Make a Test Tone?

Make a Test Tone is a generator of sine audio test signals and spoken phase checks for speaker configuration up to 10.2. It calculates flexible and highly accurate signals that are saved in AIFF and WAV (BWF) sound files up to 192 kHz. Additionally, it leaves markers in the sound files, indicating the exact frequency or amplitude at that location.

Why do I need to create a test tone?

There are a number of situations where test tones are useful, from standard reference tones that precede recordings (with Make a Test Tone, you can choose to input test tone specifications with the spoken word), to metering and adjustment of room acoustics. In general, test tones can help detect deficiencies in acoustic situations, recording, signal processing, and wiring.

Why did Audio Ease create this app?

Audio Ease has used the signal generation algorithms in Create a Test Tone extensively in producing signal processing algorithms. For example, we use these tones for quality checks of the sample rate conversion, word length reduction, and early compression algorithms in BarbaBatch (our batch sound file conversion package). The tones have proven to be a very valuable addition to listening tests with musical and speech fragments.

How to use Create a test tone?

First, you select one of the following algorithms by clicking on the first three tabs:

- Simple test tone

- Full bandwidth scan

- Custom scan

With the third option, you can create the tones and sweeps of the first two and more, but you will need to pass more parameters.

You then give your chosen algorithm some parameters that describe the exact test tone you want, using radio buttons and editable text boxes.

indicates whether you want the testtone to be introduced with spoken text (a female voice says, for example, "one thousand Hertz minus ten points zero decibels zero, sample rate 44.1 kHz"

When you do this, press the 'Generate sound file' button in the bottom right corner: a 'Save' dialog box will appear.

You choose a name for your sound file or leave the one suggested by Make A TestTone intact, navigate to a folder in which you want to save the sound file, and choose one of the available sound file formats: AIFF, WAV (BWF). Then you click 'Save'.

When the processing time exceeds one second, a progress bar will be displayed.

A 0.5 ms linear fade is applied to avoid clicking at the end of the file. Since the initial phase of the generated sine is always 0, fading is not necessary. We will now go through the three algorithms, their parameters and their applications, one by one.

Simple Test Tone

For this tone, you need to choose a frequency, level, duration, and sample. The tone will be invariable in amplitude and frequency. For the sampler, you must choose the material rate from your digital program. A marker is dropped at the beginning and end of the resulting sound file, listing the sound's parameters. You can only see these markers when the sound file is opened in editing software that recognizes markers. A standard application for these tones is the reference tone that is often needed before material recorded to tape or disc. The classic values ​​for this tone are 700 Hz, 1000 Hz and 10000 Hz, all at -10 dB and lasting 10 seconds each. These values ​​are standard frequencies for adjusting equalization, bias, levels, tape speed, and azimuth on analog recorders, but are still often used