Getting started

This walkthrough takes ~3 minutes. You’ll load a float-reference wav and a fixed-point wav, run the wav-diff tool, and read the MLD / MAD / SSNR report.

1. Open Wave Compare

Launch Mantissa and click the wave icon in the left mode-switcher (top of the column). The Wave Compare environment opens.

2. Pick the two wavs

Click the Files toolbar button to reveal the file paths panel.

• Float: your reference build’s output wav.
• Fixed: your fixed-point build’s output wav from the same input.
• Optional Fixed2: a second fixed-point variant for A/B/C comparison.

Press Enter in any of the path fields to close the panel; the Compare button now lights up.

3. Compare

Click Compare. Mantissa loads both files, plots them on top of each other, computes per-channel maximum absolute differences (MAD), and positions the DUT cursor at the worst-matching sample.

Use shift + mouse wheel over the span plot to zoom around the cursor — the spectrogram and the all-view marker stay in sync.

4. Run wav-diff

Click the wav-diff toolbar button. Mantissa runs the bundled wav-diff tool in the background and produces a per-channel report containing three metrics:

• MLD — maximum loudness difference, the BS.1387 / 3GPP TR 26.843 PEAQ ear-model peak (perceptually weighted, not raw amplitude).
• MAD — maximum absolute difference, the largest sample-by-sample error between reference and candidate.
• min SSNR — minimum segmental SNR: per-segment SNR (dB) over 20 ms windows, with the worst (lowest) value reported.

The Report button turns green when the result is ready.

Click Report to see the MLD / MAD / SSNR table and a bar chart per channel. Plot is the first tab — single-click any metric’s marker on the bar chart to jump the main view to that sample.

5. Save settings

Settings persist automatically — file paths, span, NFFT, line styles, and custom names are written to settings.json on close and restored on next launch.

Next: see the Fixed-point converter for a quick refresher on the Q ↔ E relationship, or jump into the Debugger walkthrough when it’s published.