tone generator software

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Anyone have any experience with a good software application to generate clean square waves? I have tried Visual Analyser however the square wave generated by it is not very good.

Anyone have experience with NCH Tone Generator software?

Define 'not very good'. Are you seeing symmetrical overshoots / ringing? That would be normal for a bandwidth limited system. A photo would help a lot.

 
By "not very good", referring to the Visual Analyser software, I mean extreme ringing across the entire top and bottom of the waveform, no matter what the frequency.

I don't know about your software as I use Adobe Audition 3.0 but the point is, with a limited bandwidth system you will have ringing. The problem is the equation of a squarewave has components out to infinity but in your sampled digital world you only use a handful of the components. I got the same result as you with a 1 KHz square using a 44100 sample rate. It looks much better with a sample rate of 192000. BTW if you look up old reviews of CD players the 1 KHz square response has symmetrical ringing.

If you need a ring free square you could buy a sine / square audio generator or run your computer output into a comparator to clean up the edges. you'd still need line drive and level set stages after the comparator.

 
There is a nice tone generator here...
* JSigGen
It runs as a Java applet so will work on Win/Lin/and Mac and is careware.
(check the application author's careware definition page but the app is free to download and use and asks you to "pay' for it by caring more about your fellow humans- a lovely way to promote a better world for all. :)

* The CareWare Idea

But it will have the same problem scitizen17 is having. The software isn't the problem. The re-construction filter is the limiting factor and there is nothing to be done about it except to use a different signal generator.

 
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I used the NHC tone gen many years ago, liked it fine. But now I stay FAR away from their stuff. Anything they make installs tons of bloatware, adware and other crap. Beware.

Audacity is free (get the current Beta) and will generate tones. Or the trial version of ARTA, or Goldwave (not free, but long trial). I think even WinISD has a tone generator.
 
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