Incoherence: A stereo frequency visualizing mixing aid

I googled across a brilliant looking tool the other day. It's a standalone application for PPC macs called Incoherence from the blasphemously named OMG Audio.

What it does, is listen to incoming audio and plot it on a graph with the X axis representing the stereo field (mono sounds appear in the middle) and the Y axis representing frequency (bass sounds at the bottom). It's a way to visualise the spatial and timbral arrangement of audio in a mix--great for helping to identify and fix masking issues, and for making sure that you're properly taking advantage of the stereo field. This is the kind of meter that the main DAWs should include built-in by now.

Of course Incoherence can be put to good use 'visualising' your own mixes; with an audio piping tool like soundflower you can use it to see the audio coming out of your DAW as you mix. But the blurb on the website points out another very important potential use for Incoherence, particularly for those getting started with mixing audio: It can be used to analyse other people's mixes and to 'see' what they've done.

'Trust your ears' is a mantra you'll hear echoing through most audio forums. What this rule of thumb misses though is that you need to train your ears before you can really trust them. And this is exactly where a tool like incoherence comes in.

Is it really as useful as I hope? I'll know for sure after an Intel compatible version is released.

Until then what are the alternatives?

There's Spectrafoo's 'phase torch' meter, which comes close, but Spectrafoo costs $400. If you own Reaktor there's also FAST meter in the user library, but it's a heavy CPU hog.

Slim pickings!