I'm an intermediate-level programmer working on my first Processing project, using Minim. Before jumping into anything crazy, I'm just trying to get the basic FFT vertical bar visualizer (basically hello world for music visualization) up and running. I expected a successful test run, but I had expected the data from the FFT object to be scaled between 0 and 1, as they are when working with processing.sound. I am instead getting values between 0 and about 3.2. I know what I would need to do to perform the scaling myself, except I have absolutely no clue what the upper bound for the data should be, and I get the feeling it can vary from audio file to audio file.
There must be a simple solution to this, right? I don't see how anyone could possibly have created any controllable visualizers from FFT data otherwise, but I've spent more time searching for the answer to this than I have writing actual code.