Once the AcoustoDict database has been populated, selecting Optimal Material and clicking Match… allows finding a combination of material and thickness that best matches a desired absorption curve. In the opening dialog box, in the Media Selection panel, select the database materials to be considered for the optimization. As default, all materials are selected.

To deselect one material, click on the name to highlight it and then click Uncheck Selected or just uncheck the box. To deselect multiple materials, it is faster to press SHIFT+Left mouse button while moving the mouse over a range of materials and then, click Uncheck Selected. The selection of unselected materials is done in the same way but clicking Check Selected instead.

In the Constraints panel, enter minimum and maximum Thickness as well as the Grammage. All materials that fall outside the specified grammage interval or that are uncompressible to the indicated thickness range are highlighted in red in the database and are ignored in the matching.

Enter the values for the desired absorption curve in the table, which consists of Frequency and corresponding Desired Absorption coefficient pairs. Select one of the rows and use Insert Row or Delete Row to add or eliminate pairs of values. Alternatively, right-click into the table, save the table date to a text file, edit the text file and load the data back into the table. Or simply copy & paste data from the clipboard using the common Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts.

The curve of these frequency/absorption values is displayed on the right while the user enters the values.

When clicking Match in the Constraints panel, AcoustoDict considers the materials fulfilling the given thickness and grammage constraints and computes the absorption curve at different thicknesses within the given interval.

A graph with the five materials that best match the desired absorption characteristics is displayed on the right with the name of the materials in the legend. The table now includes new columns with the absorption values at the given frequencies for these five materials:

Notice that the thickness of the database materials is also taken into account and, therefore, the name of the materials indicates at which thickness of that material the best match occurs. Drag the corners and expand the dialog box to better observe the graph and the table columns. Right-click into the table to save the data in a text file.

Right-click inside the graph to change the graph settings:

Clicking Clear in the Constraints panel makes the values of the matched materials in the table and their curves in the graph disappear. Afterwards, you can start over trying to match other materials in the database.