One of the global NinjaTrader properties you can set for indicators is the ‘Calculate On Bar Close’ property. By default with PriceSquawk this setting is set to false, so that PriceSquawk processes every tick from the live data feed. If you set this value to True however, you can then control how often PriceSquawk receives data with the associated chart period. For instance if you have Calculate On Bar Close set to True, and set an ES chart to be a 20 tick chart, then PriceSquawk will play sounds based on the information contained over 20 ticks (trades) in the ES. The trade volume will be the 20 tick trade volume, and the trade price will be the closing price of the most recent 20 tick bar. During the opening trading of ES this can be a very useful filter in order to get clearer information out of trade sounds and the audio volume control feature. Each sound you hear represents the most recent 20 ticks (or whatever you set the chart period to).
Price Action and Candlestick traders may like to hear sounds every one minute in a similar fashion. PriceSquawk could play a note on the close of each one minute bar representing the closing price, and total volume traded during the previous minute. Using this feature on tick charts with the E-mini might be a good idea if you wish to use trade sounds and volume control features but find one note per tick (trade) a bit too intense. Each sound will still contain all the volume information over the selected period of ticks, and capture the tick to tick price action.
Calculate On Bar Close Setting