[PLUG] Digital Signal Processing?

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

You're describing what you're trying to accomplish in rather low-level
DSP detail. There are some very "user friendly" DSP packages out there.
I think Matlab is probably the best known, but it's licensed. There are
free variants, however -- Octave is for sure free and SciLab is at least
in the Debian and Gentoo repositories, although I don't know if the
SciLab license passes the strictest definitions of freedom.

If you're working with audio frequency data, you've got even more
options in the free software world. These packages will all give you
nice graphical results, spectral, lots of options, choice of windows, etc.

Russell Senior wrote:

>I am trying to figure out how to apply a Hamming (or Kaiser or various
>alternative) window to a time-domain sample prior to an FFT in order
>to more accurate characterize amplitude of an embedded signal.  I
>don't actually care _that much_ about the frequency, but I care a lot
>about the amplitude.  The literature I've found so far is a few steps
>over my head at the moment and I don't have the time to climb that
>twisting staircase of understanding now.  Can anyone point me at a
>practical treatment of how to apply these windows to data?
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