The Audioscope

As a VFD/VU meter nerd, my favorite WebTV excusive feature by far is the audioscope. Let me show you how to use it.

To start out, just pop the <audioscope> tag in the body section of your code. You'll see a very simple audioscope that looks like this:

Of course, this isn't exactly the most pleasant thing to look at right now. Let's try changing the background color. Similar to many other HTML tags, we can do this by using the <bgcolor> attribute. I'll change my audioscope color to black by changing my code to <audioscope bgcolor=#000000>.

That looks much better, doesn't it? Of course, it also looks a bit thin, so i'll try stretching it out with the <width> attribute. If you want your audioscope to go across the entire screen, I recommend setting the width to 861, so it looks correct on the Japan exclusive Sega Dreamcast version.

That's much better, but let's say I want to change the height. This works the same way as the <width> attribute, but with <height> this time. I'll set the height to 50.

You can also set a border around the audioscope with the <border> attribute. I'll add a border with a size of 4.

Now we're getting into audioscope exclusive territory. Say you want to lower the height of the right channel bar, to look more like the audioscope that appears in the title bar when you play an audio file. To do this, you can use the <rightoffset> attribute. I'll set it to 5. Of course, you can also change the offset of the left channel as well if you'd like. You can also use negative numbers to raise a channel.

If you'd like to change the color of the channels, you can use the <leftcolor> or <rightcolor> attributes. I'll make both channels red.

If you want a bar that shows the maximum level of the audioscope over time, use the <maxlevel="true"> attribute.

If you want the audioscope to act more dramatically, you can also set the gain of the audioscope with the <gain> attribute. I'll set the gain of my audioscope to 3.

If you set the gain to 0, you'll get a different audioscope that looks like a level meter. Unfortunately, <maxlevel> doesn't seem to work here.

And finally, if you put all of this together, you can create some very complicated and interesting audioscopes. Here's one I made a few months ago.

Enjoy!