> Step by step

1. The top bar

1 Ultimately, SPAN is all about the information provided by the main Spectrum Analyser and the Statistics section below it, and there are many ways to tailor the presentation of the main graph display. Let’s start, quite literally, at the top, with the standard array of fundamental Control Buttons common to all Voxengo plugins.

2 At the far left, the ? button turns on SPAN’s handy tooltip system, giving details of whatever the mouse is positioned over at the bottom of the interface. Mildly annoyingly, the text strip obscures some of the Statistics panel, but you shouldn’t need to use it for long, so don’t hold that against them. There are further tooltip options available throughout the plugin’s sub-panels.

3 Clicking the Presets button opens the Preset Manager, wherein presets and programs can be saved, loaded, named, updated and, well, managed. Factory ROM bank contains SPAN’s uneditable factory presets, while the ’temporary’ Session Bank holds three presets for quick recall. Store your own presets in User banks, and specify one to load with the plugin using the Set as Default button. 4 The dropdown Presets menu (the nearby arrow) gives instant access to all your presets and Session Bank programs, and the Undo and Redo buttons to the right of that let you step backwards and forwards through SPAN’s undo history. Each Session Bank program is stored with its own history, so you can switch between them as if they were separate instances of the plugin. 5 SPAN can store two complete state setups at once, using Voxengo’s straightforward A/B comparison system. The two states are switched between using the A or B buttons, with parameter changes made at any time affecting only the currently selected state. To copy the A setup to the B slot or vice versa, click the A>B or B>A button. States can be copied between Session Bank programs, too. 6 Although most of it won’t actually be relevant to many SPAN users, Voxengo’s standard Channel Routing panel enables comprehensive assignment of inputs to outputs, as well as encoding and decoding of mid/side signals from and to stereo. You can define schemes and save them as presets, but all you need to know for now is that the dropdown menu next to the Routing button contains a range of presets. 7 The Channel Group Selector button switches between the channel groups defined in the Channel Routing panel for analysis. For music production, this is of most use in Mid/Side or Dual Mono mode, where the mid, side, left and right channels are each set up as groups. Click the button to flip from channel to channel, and to hear the selected channel in isolation, click the Solo button. 8 To copy one channel’s settings to another, click the Copy to button and select the target channel. Activating the Show All Channel Meters button in the Channel Routing panel shows an output meter strip for every channel, rather than just the strip for the currently selected one. 9 Finally in the top bar, the Hide Meters and Stats button expands the Spectrum Analyser to fill the GUI, doing away with the output meter and Statistics panel, while the Settings button opens SPAN’s Information and Settings panel, which we’ll take a good look at later in another walkthrough.