HOLMImpulse: Measuring Frequency & Impulse Response

Sorry, I forgot to mention about the response in Holm, yes there's a small blip in the response corresponding to every pop during the sweep. It's not horrible by any means but I would prefer to get a clean reading obviously.
I have actually thought about getting a small form factor PC like an Intel NUC but the problem is that I would need to get a monitor as well and it's not something I really need it at the moment. I have a Thinkpad8 Windows tablet I think I'm gonna install Holm and ARTA and see if it has enough juice to power my external sound card and mic, it's just that working with something like this in a 8" screen isn't exactly fun but at this point I'm ready to give it a try.
 
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Have you tried the different options for the simulated sound card? Also is there more than one driver choice available in Holm? There may be a few options which can be tried.

I tried to get my focusrite 2i2 working in a VM, but the loopbacks were shocking. I thought it would be the best option as it is passing through the usb and using the native drivers in the VM, but unfortunately it didn't seem to work like that.

Tony.
 
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I've never tried to run it in anything but actual Windows. For me, HOLM always worked best in XP. I keep an old laptop just for that purpose.

I would get clicks and pops on old hardware if too many things were running. Always had to turn off the WiFi. Some very old hardware was never click, pop free. Somewhere, maybe in this thread there is discussion of software that can test your setup for interrupts and other Windows problems. No idea if it works in a VM.
 
I've never tried to run it in anything but actual Windows. For me, HOLM always worked best in XP. I keep an old laptop just for that purpose.

I would get clicks and pops on old hardware if too many things were running. Always had to turn off the WiFi. Some very old hardware was never click, pop free. Somewhere, maybe in this thread there is discussion of software that can test your setup for interrupts and other Windows problems. No idea if it works in a VM.

Hi Pano,

There is a latency checker here;

DPC Latency Checker

Peter
 
Have you tried the different options for the simulated sound card? Also is there more than one driver choice available in Holm? There may be a few options which can be tried.

I tried to get my focusrite 2i2 working in a VM, but the loopbacks were shocking. I thought it would be the best option as it is passing through the usb and using the native drivers in the VM, but unfortunately it didn't seem to work like that.

Tony.

I use an USB M-Audio card, other than that I only have an old and cheap Creative USB card but this one doesn't have phantom power, not even a line in, only a mic in and line out so no loopback option with this one, but I'm gonna give it a try with this too as I have an old Alpine Audyssey mic that works with this.
 
I would get clicks and pops on old hardware if too many things were running. Always had to turn off the WiFi. Some very old hardware was never click, pop free. Somewhere, maybe in this thread there is discussion of software that can test your setup for interrupts and other Windows problems. No idea if it works in a VM.
I always make sure the only thing running is Holm but the problem persists.
 
So yesterday I installed and ran Holm, ARTA and REW on my Thinkpad8 tablet using the Creative USB card and Alpine Audyssey mic for the input and the tablet output so no loopback but all the sweeps were clean and and no clicks or pops, measurements were consistent between the 3 apps.
I wish I could get it working on the virtualbox but looks like I might have to use the Thinkpad8 for the time being... :/
 
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Here it is nearly 10 years later and I still run HOLMImpulse and find it very useful. And it continues to work, even on Windows 10.

However, there is one recent bug. HOLM will no longer import an impulse in WAV format. It just crashes immediately. No problem importing anything else, but importing an impulse simply isn't working. Don't know if this is a Windows problem, or a .Net change or something else. HOLM hasn't changed or been updated in years, so it's not the software itself.

I know a few other people are having the same problem. Has anyone found a fix? Thanks.
 
I've had problems lately with my ancient CoolEdit not reading some .wav files. I doubt this helps but the SoX documentation mentions this and has its own workaround. A simple enough thing is to use SoX to read a .wav and write its .wavpcm (the file extension is still .wav).

.wavpcm
A non-standard, but widely used, variant of .wav. Some applications cannot read a standard WAV
file header for PCM-encoded data with sample-size greater than 16-bits or with more than two
channels, but can read a non-standard WAV header. It is likely that such applications will eventually
be updated to support the standard header, but in the mean time, this SoX format can be used
to create files with the non-standard header that should work with these applications. (Note that
SoX will automatically detect and read WAV files with the non-standard header.)
 
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Thanks Scott.

When HOLM does throw an error message during import it says something about reading restricted memory or similar. I can post a screen shot if anyone needs to see it.
HOLM will no longer even import an impulse file that it just exported. :xeye:

Unfortunately I could not get SOX working in Foobar. Don't know why, I used SOX a few years back, but no luck now. I did try as many wave formats as I could from other software; signed, unsigned, 16, 24, 32 bit, float or not, u-law and others. No luck at all.

Maybe it's time to contact the developer, even tho the website explicitly says "No Support". HOLMImpulse is such a good piece software it's a shame to see it fade away.
 
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Pano, just had a thought, not sure if it will work but may be worth a try.

Have a look at the screen shot below. it looks like holm stores it's measurements as flacs. If you replace the flac for one of the slots (in the zip file) with a flac of the impulse you want then you may be able to "import" it that way :)

Just make sure to make a backup of the zip file first as corruption of the zip can cause holm to crash on startup (the way to fix that is to delete it and it will create a new one, but then you lose all the measurements that were in the zip....

Tony.
 

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I did try Tony's trick of replacing one of the measurement FLAC files inside the HOLM zip archive and it worked. :up: :up: Made sure that the sample rate matched the replaced measurement. All looks pretty good. The impulse file to be imported was saved in FLAC format and renamed measurement-001.flac outside of the archive. It was then just delete one file and drag the new one in.

I see some strange artifacts if the impulse window is zoomed way out, but they don't affect the FR graph or anything.

Nice workaround, Mr Tony.
 
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Cool! Since that works you should be able to add in flacs (and corresponding info file) for empty slots as well, as it seems it only has files for slots that have already had measurements.
I downloaded a flac converter this morning but didn't get a chance to try it out. Good to hear it works!

edit: I also had another thought this morning. The errors seem to usually be illegal memory access type errors. I can't remember when it was implemented but there is a setting in the bios (on by default I would think) that turns on memory protection, so if something tries to access out of range memory it throws an exception. I'm thinking that holm may have always had a memory overflow bug, but it was such that it rarely cuased issues as it could still read the memory, but now with this extra protection (which is to help stop buffer overflow type exploits) it may now fail.

SO. disabling in the bios the memory protection feature (whilst not good for security in general) may make holm behave. I'm going to have to try it, because one of the problems I have with holm since I went to windows7 64bit (which happened when I got a new computer) is that I can't do a loopback calibration without it crashing.

Tony.
 
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Just another Moderator
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If you have a line out from the mic preamp, or a sound card with Mic inputs that have phantom power then yes. If you have a calibration file for the mic then that is good too. As I understand it, Studio mic's are not necessarily flat in response.

It may also be a cardiod mic (generally for speaker measurements omni-directional is preferred) but if you are doing gated measurements (taking out room reflections) then cardiod provided you put it on axis, I think should be fine.

Tony.