Can anyone recommend a software oscilloscope solution for OSX?
There are modes you can run some of the different FOH software available out there which will show a visual waveform of different types. Try, for instance, Mac the Scope or Mac FOH or the recently released Mac version of SMAART. Both Mac the Scope and SMAART have free demos available. MacFOH is a one-man developer, and getting a free demo from him might take some finagling. For screen capturing to a Quicktime file, you should use Snapz Pro X. For outputting as video and recording that way, there’s a DVI to Video dongle you can buy which will tell your Mac that it’s got a video-sized monitor hooked to it. You can then move the target window to the second monitor and hook a recorder to the provided S
I tried using smexoscope, but the display redraws horizontally rather than refreshing continuously. SMAART seems the best option so far, but try as I might, I can’t disable various text labels on the visualisation field, hampering the usefulness somewhat. Apart from that issue, it’s pretty useful. Mac FOH looked good, but is incredibly expensive. It also appears to not be released yet. On the other hand, Snapz Pro X is superb, doing exactly what I need in a pretty decent user interface. Three thumbs up for that! I’m now thinking I might have to find a vintage oscilloscope on eBay to get the right effect.
I tried using smexoscope, but the display redraws horizontally rather than refreshing continuously. Have you tried using the time control to zoom in? It’s been a long time since I used an actual oscilloscope but IIRC oscilloscopes typically update horizontally (at 60Hz or whatever), and most of the time in practical use for electronics they appear to be continuously updating because one is looking at just a few cycles at like 1kHz, so the width of one cycle is 1/1000th of a second — i.e. the data comes in faster than the update rate of the screen. The default settings on smexoscope are for the width to be something like 2sec, so you won’t get continuous updating because the trace is moving from left to right at too slow a rate (.5Hz). It would have to move fast enough that the entire width updates at maybe 10 frames per second before it would start to appear continuous to the eye. I get something like continuous updating when the time knob is set to .3 or so.
