autosens=1 quick decrease, slow increase

[Lowrida]

Are you using cava from a package repository, like AUR?
No, from this git

Describe the bug
autosens=1
When volume at full it decreases quickly, but when after i set volume very low, it does not increase the bars..
It takes at least 2 minutes before the bars come up again.

Expected behavior
Decrease and increase of bars globally the same speed.

Desktop (please complete the following information):
Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon 6.6.7, Ubuntu 24.04, Kernel 6.17.0-14
cava version 0.10.7-43-ge4f6cbb

Terminal emulator
I don't use the terminal bars, only the data stream for my own conky player with VU meters

If there are further questions or info needed, let me know.

config file

[general]
bars = 2
lower_cutoff_freq = 40
higher_cutoff_freq = 15000
sleep_timer = 10
sensitivity = 90
autosens = 1

[smoothing]
noise_reduction = 40

[output]
data_format = ascii
ascii_max_range = 1000
bit_format = 16bit
method = raw
style = stereo
channels = stereo
bar_delimiter = 32
raw_target = /dev/stdout

[input]
method = pulse
source = auto

[pallaswept]

I don't know a lot about the drawing side of cava but maybe I can help...

No, from this git

Which commit are you using?

[Lowrida]

cava 0.10.6-17-g4875dcb

[pallaswept]

Ahh OK it's not related to what I was looking at, sorry. There was a change made just hours ago, which I thought might be related. That commit is quite old though, perhaps while you wait for Karl to arrive you might try a more recent one and see how you go?

[Lowrida]

I have now cava 0.10.7-43-ge4f6cbb installed. The problem i have is still there... quick decrease, slow increase.

[pallaswept]

Ahh I can reproduce here. Steps I follow are:

Start cava (with autosens=1)
play a video in haruna. volume set to 50%
note that autosens has 'settled' and bars are full height
turn haruna volume down to 5%
bars hardly move. autosens causes them to grow slowly
after a long time (minutes) the bars have reached full height again
increase volume in haruna to 50%
bars are too tall briefly and quickly adjust to normal full height
decrease volume in haruna to 5%
bars hardly move, slowly grow...

[Lowrida]

Yes indeed. The decreasing takes place in a second, but the increasing takes minutes!
Seems to me that this also should take a few seconds.. at least withing 10 seconds.

[karlstav]

Well if they increased just as fast as they decreased all the bars would be maxing out all the time.

This is the issue we just had in #761

So it is supposed to be slow. It can't immediately compensate for turning the volume down. Then it would interfere with the feeling of the visualisation itself. (What if there is a quiet part in the song you are playing?)

If you want it to reset you can reload it by pressing r

[Lowrida]

Ok, i see the logic in that.. but i don't listen to music that has long silences of minutes in it. So is there an option to set the seconds of waiting before it increases?

Or is it maybe possible to add such option?

autossense=1
autosense_increase=10   (seconds)
autosense_decrease=5    (seconds)

I'm not using the bars on the terminal, so 'r' wouldn't work. I use the ascii data stream only that is stored in a file and the lua script reads these values.

[karlstav]

We could consider an option for adjusting the autosens aggressiveness.

You could try changing the parameters in the source manually just to test how much more aggressive would be sufficient.

it is the 0.001 here:

cava/cavacore.c

Line 453 in e4f6cbb

p->sens = p->sens * (1 + (0.001 * framerate_mod));

it should be linear so 0.002 would be twice as fast.

In my opinion 0.01 (which was I set it to accidentally the other day) causes way too much overshooting .

Also, songs with long fades (30 seconds) will cause the sensitivity to increase too fast if we tweak it too high.

[Lowrida]

Thank you! I have set it to 0.004 and that's fine by me. I don't listen to classical music anyway, so i do not have many long silences in my music. Also when it happens and after a silence the music volume goes up, the decreasing part is so quick you almost don't notice the short overshoot.

Can this be made as an option in the config?

edit: I played a little with different values, but changing this value also changes the overall behavior! While playing decent volume it overshoots slightly more often with 0.004.

[karlstav]

I made a dirt simple implementation that just reuses the existing autosens option autosens = 0 and autosens = 1 still produces the exact same behavior as before. But now you can set it further to 2,3...n to increase sensitivity n times faster. so autosens = 4 will give you exactly the same behavior as you get with that value to 0.004 in the source.

[Lowrida]

That's a nice solution! Is this available in the next version?

[karlstav]

Yes, all versions are just tags on the master branch.

Not sure when the next release will be. There are some recent additions that needs to mature a bit first.