This is the one setting here that changes what actually gets encoded — the final loudness of the hidden tone itself, for both the Encoder's Play preview and Export. It doesn't touch your lane data, timing, or color balance, only the overall level on top of it.

A fixed headroom budget keeps SpectraStrobe and Lumasonic's stacked color tones (the reference tone plus Red/Green/Blue, all potentially near-max at once) mathematically bounded below full scale — that used to be the main source of harsh, "hot"-sounding output, before this existed. This slider is a separate, additional control for overall comfort, not what fixed that. That budget covers the hidden reference/color tones only, though — it doesn't extend to the audible Isochronic Tone or Sub Tone below if you turn those on too, so watch the peak meter next to Play/Export if you're running color, Isochronic, and Sub Tone all at once. VibroEncode's own decoder is adaptive (it compares against the room's live noise floor rather than a fixed level), so there's real room to lower this — but if you're targeting real light-and-sound hardware with its own fixed threshold, keep some margin and confirm with Test Hardware before relying on a low setting.

Purely an editing convenience — this never touches what gets saved or exported, only where a plain dot lands when you place or drag it in the Encoder. Off (free-flow) by default. Pill creation and dragging, and the popup's typed time field, always use their own fine, fixed precision regardless of this setting.

Flicker Rate is the one lane every codec has, so it's treated as the anchor: a dot on any other lane snaps to the nearest existing Flicker Rate dot first, and only falls back to the ruler's tick marks when no Flicker Rate dot is close enough on screen. It's a one-time snap when you drop the dot — moving a Flicker Rate dot afterward doesn't drag anything that aligned to it earlier along with it.

Everything above hides its signal in an inaudible ultrasonic tone for real hardware to decode. This is the opposite: an ordinary, audible pulsed tone gated at the exact same Flicker Rate, Drift, gate shape, and duty cycle as the hidden signal, mixed into both the Play preview and Export — so entrainment works through plain headphones too, no glasses required. Off by default; nothing changes for anyone until this is turned on.

For vibroacoustic therapy tables and transducer furniture — a low-frequency tone meant to be felt through the body rather than heard. Independent of the Isochronic Tone above: it is not synced to Flicker Rate. Real vibroacoustic practice runs on a slow, continuous amplitude swell rather than a rate synced to anything — gating a felt tone on/off at a typical flicker rate would read as rapid physical thumping, not a pulse — so this instead breathes gently on its own fixed cycle, mixed into both the Play preview and Export. Off by default; nothing changes for anyone until this is turned on.

Not recommended with a pacemaker or other implanted cardiac device, during pregnancy, or with a history of blood clots — check with a doctor first if unsure.

These only affect how VibroEncode reads back a signal that's already there — the Encoder tab's own Play preview, and Play a File's Screen Mode. They have no effect on how a file gets encoded.

Some light-and-sound machines — like the MindPlace Kasina — read tones hidden above normal hearing range to flash their LEDs in sync with audio. AudioStrobe uses one tone for brightness only; SpectraStrobe and Lumasonic each use four tones for independent color. Use this to confirm your specific device and cables actually reproduce whichever one you're testing — independent of any file or lane data.

If you're testing through speakers instead of headphones, start at a low system volume and increase gradually. These tones sit right at the edge of hearing for a lot of people, and SpectraStrobe and Lumasonic in particular are steady, full-strength tones with no pulsing — genuinely loud at higher volumes, not just noticeable.

Requires AudioStrobe/SpectraStrobe/Lumasonic-compatible hardware to see any effect, and should be silent or near-silent to most people on ordinary speakers.

Pick a file with a real embedded Lumasonic/AudioStrobe/SpectraStrobe signal, hit Start, and Screen Mode will decode and display it directly, full-screen.