Settings

The Settings surface (the gear icon in the top bar; hash URL #settings) is where you set your goals and control how the app displays your results. Most changes apply across Home, Studio, and Practice when you press Save; the gender-coding switch applies immediately.

This page covers the web Settings surface. Per-analysis extraction controls (pitch floor/ceiling, formant mode, sibilant method) are documented separately in Configuration.

Targets · your goal bands

Choose a base profile and, optionally, edit the target bands it composes:

• Speaking pitch (median F0)
• Resonance — formant dispersion (shown with an approximate ≈ 14–15 cm vocal-tract equivalent)
• Expressiveness (pitch variation), in semitones

Each row has low–high inputs, help text, inline validation, and a per-row reset link back to the profile default once you have overridden it. A tracking-only profile shows "This profile tracks your measurements without a target band". Your edits are stored as target overrides and drive the target bands and meters everywhere. For what each profile targets, see Goal profiles.

Display

• Gender coding — a switch that shows or hides the masculine / androgynous / feminine reference bands and position colouring. Turn it off to see raw values and your own target band only. This is a display choice only — it never changes what is measured. It applies everywhere immediately and clears any per-page gender-coding toggles.

  Gender coding is resolved per surface: each of Home, Studio, and Practice has a small on/off switch that pins a per-page override, and this global switch is the default they fall back to. Flipping the global switch here resets those page overrides so it visibly takes effect everywhere. See Voice and gender perception for why this is framed as a reference, not a verdict.

• Resonance unit — display resonance as formant dispersion (Hz) or vocal-tract length (cm). Dispersion in hertz is the canonical value; centimetres is a derived display unit, never a 0–100 score. See Formants.

• Default timeline zoom — Phrase or Full recording, the zoom the Studio timeline opens at.

Transcription

Installed app only. The browser version does not transcribe and does not show this section.

• Whisper backend — Auto (fastest available), MLX (Apple Silicon), or faster-whisper. Backends that are not installed are disabled and annotated, with a warning if the saved backend is missing.
• Whisper model — the model size used for transcription. Larger models are more accurate but slower on CPU.

Transcription powers word segments and sibilant word-gating; see Sibilants.

Remote access

Installed app only. If you open the installed app through a remote address that requires an access key, enter the key here. It is stored in this browser only.

Storage on this device

Browser version only. Shows how much browser storage the app uses and whether the browser has agreed to keep it persistent, with a Keep storage persistent button when it has not. Export backup and Import backup save and restore your recordings, results, preferences and practice records as a .vab file. See Storage and privacy.

Downloaded packages

Browser version only. Shows the analysis runtime, the software the app downloads into the browser to run analyses, with links to its source code, licenses and notices. You can remove it here; the app downloads it again the next time it needs it.

Layout

Per-surface panel layout with a Reset all layouts button that clears any custom arrangements you made with the Customize button on Home.

Saving

A save bar shows a status line ("Unsaved changes — press Save to apply.", "No unsaved changes.", "Fix the highlighted band to save.") plus Reset to defaults and Save changes (enabled only when there are valid, unsaved edits).

Where your settings are stored depends on the version:

• In the browser version, they are stored in this browser, with your recordings.
• In the installed app, preferences are split so a partial failure only re-sends the affected half: profile, gender-coding default, and whisper settings persist to the app config, while target overrides and display preferences persist to a separate preferences file, on the machine running the server.

See Storage and privacy.