The high-end DSP plugin company Waves have been, yes, making waves (groan… I know, it’s too easy) with their newest efforts to crack down on those using cracks (someone stop me!), banpiracy.com. I won’t rehash it all when Peter Kirn over at createdigitalmusic.com has been doing a far better job than I could. But a couple of things to note: a.) as far as anyone can tell banpiracy.com is simply a front for Waves and no other developer/company is copping to being part of this “initiative” - i.e. visiting pro studios under one pretense and checking to see if they’re licenses are up-to-date, then suing them if they’re not. 2.) Waves have a long history of actively and aggressively protecting their wares (…I’ll stop, really, I will…) with OS-hooks, dongles, on-line licenses - the works, all at once. Thirdly, even in the high-end audio software market Waves charge a lot of money. And finally, piracy is a problem, even among pro and semi-pro studios. Don’t even argue otherwise. Anecdotal stories demoing cracks and/or later buying cracked software do not a solid case make. I personally had a very busy, albeit ghetto, urban studio brag to me about how much/many stolen software and sample libraries they had, and if I ever wanted they could hook me up.¹

My views on the quality of Waves actual software are as immaterial as they are uninformed. I’m sure they do what they promise and indeed sprinkle Magic Pixie Dust^TM all over your tracks. I’m sure they make tracks warm, and fat, and, erm, whatever other audio buzz-word you want to use here. They sure do make them louder. I, however, would not know. Well, other than what I’ve read from others who know a lot more about this than I, and it’s hard to argue with a list of users that reads like a (very geeky) who’s who of audio production. As much as it’s a money thing, it’s the whole copy protection issue. Additionally, as pretty and impressive as the Waves plugs may seem, if I was going to drop that kind of coin, there are a lot of other options.

So, let’s look at that proposition.
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In the inbox this morning: Zebra V2.2 released!

So, while most user have been using the beta for a few weeks (months?), developer Urs has nailed down the last of the bugs and made it official.

Requisite purloined update feature list after the jump:
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Two new VST pluings are now available to anyone who wishes to download. One appears to be a rather polished “sampler” that is more or less official abandonware. The other is a raw chunk of open source programming that may be a diamond in the rough.

The former, Vember Audio’s Shortcircuit, is simple-sample engine, with the emphasis on traditional sampler paradigms, i.e. not build around huge sample libraries, i.e. you drop single sample into it and mangle, modulate and trigger them. Windows only. I don’t know, is there a good MAC VST/AU simple sample playback, like Live’s Simpler or Cakewalk’s DropZone?

B.) The other, VSTLus by programmer John Williamson, is the first iteration of a MIDI utility that runs custom MIDI scripts. So all those hours you’ve spent scoring the web for free VSTi MIDI/MFX plugs and trying to understand/get them to work, can now be spent learning what appears a straightforward scripting language, that will do whatever MIDI tricks you can dream up. It’s all a bit above my head, especially in regard the the plugin’s programming, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it. Windows only, but since it’s a BSD license here’s to hoping some enterprising MAC/~nix coder can recompile it. I image the scripts are cross-platform, and there’s a rudimentary API, so there’s plenty there for the hardcore. In some ways it reminds me of mucoder’s hypercyclic (my top choice for the Dev Challenge), or, more specifically, a stripped down MFX Development Kit. Personally, I love a good GUI, and the MIDI-hacking I’m most interested in are those that lead me in directions I’d probably not come across on my own, different flavors/degrees of generative and sequencing and modulation scripts. So hypercyclic fills that slot nicely for me. But who knows what can happen with this.

The final top 3:

1. Elements of Nature
2. hypercyclic
3. The Element of Surprise

In 2006, 3 of the 4 I singled out were the top 3 placers.

This year, I’m batting 3 out of 3!¹

A keen eye for quality and innovation? An influential opinion among the members of KvR? Or am I merely some sort of idiot savant?

I suspect it has something it has something to do with this², but there’s no way to back that argument up without sounding like a complete jackass.

But, obviously, I believe three very worthy digital contraptions were awarded their due. Not the order I would have put them in, but why quibble?

Anyway, some morning-after notes:
Because of my recent adventures in system maintance none of my initial downloads got beyond a 2nd chance. So, yes, I may have overlooked some gems, but apparently I was pretty damn close.

It’s interesting that a SynthEdit plug took the top spot. And the 3rd spot. I would have thought that the cross-platform plugin would have drawn in votes the SE plugs couldn’t get. Then again, hypercyclic’s genius isn’t quickly apparent: it’s a MIDI tool, a smart and unusual MIDI tool and one that benefits from strong host MIDI-routing, but not as gee-wiz apparent as a snyth or DSP.

About the SynthEdit plugs. It’s great that this development environment is out there and lets some real artists do some fine work. We now have access to all sorts of plugins that commercial developers wouldn’t come up with on their own. But its bugs are becoming more and more limiting, for both the developers and the users. Even if te SE developer releases a new version which fixes the dual-core bugs that apparently plague it (I haven’t had my dual-core long enough to encounter this myself) and the “all notes off” bug, that leaves a lot of plugins out there that were created on the old version that need to be recompiled. Nevertheless, this is a real victory for the necessity of VST development platform that is available to the enthusiast as well as the more serious coder.

As rekkerd says “…it is a well deserved win. xoxos has released tons of cool freeware plug-ins over the last few years, more than doing his part in the community.” It’s a cool idea, thoroughly executed, though it’s actual long-term usefulness is still a question. Kudos to Ugo for his exploration of simplicity in the creative process. And cheers to the hypercylic devs for giving me a tool I look forward to exploiting more fully.

^{1Look below the list, in the notes, at the bold text; the bold formatting was inserted at the time of writing.}

^{2The link is to a google lecture on the paradox of choice. Watch it while thinking about your workflow, your plugin folder, all the things about you current setup that you think could be better. Really, it’s enlightening.}

Loudness wars aside.

This morning I decided I’m no longer going to refer to my final stage before burning to CD or ripping to MP3 as “Mastering.” Cause really, what I’m doing probably in no way resembles mastering. It’s “Finalizing.” Yeah, that makes sense.

Someday, I look forward to actually getting a finished CD mastered by someone who knows what they’re doing, has a good acoustic space, and won’t squash the crap out of it.

Until that time I do it myself. (Right now I’m looking forward to finishing a CD.)

For a long time I’d brought my bounced 2-bus mix into SoundForge and worked from there. I’ve always mixed low so I always have a fair degree of headroom in which to work. Using the plugin chainer I would run the wave through Vintage Warmer+GlissEQ+dbMasteringLimiter - though I’d switched to iZotope Ozone mastering limiter included with version 9.

But with the new version of Sonar, I’ve set up a much more flexible finalizing template. I can having two tracks of different mixes running through 2 busses that I can mix and match, so I can play with different DSP chains. To be honest, I pretty much run it through the same sequence; though I’m using the new Boost10 included in Sonar which is a really great plugin. Plus Sonar has great dithering options. And with my new Sonar-template setup I can run all kinds of eye-candy and tools - VintageMeter, analyzers, and now this.

Ozone has an option for killing intersample overs, but as quickly as I gained that knowledge I it became unavailable to me as it’s tied to SoundForge. So this will slot in nicely to my new finalizing template. So, yea! for SSL for this nice freebie. And some day I’ll have the resource to get one of these.

Cheers to AI for the heads up.

Okay!

Further my earlier post concerning this year’s Developer Challenge.

While I haven’t come to any truly informed decisions, here’s what I downloaded:

• Alien Artifact
• Blip
• Bouncer
• Flicker
• hypercyclic
• Najnaj
• Rasta Box
• Rhythmic Tangent
• Shaker Maker
• Sounds of Nature
• Speak & Pluck
• The Element of Surprise
• Tiny-Q
• ?

Like I said in my initial post this time ’round, it’s a very Book-by-its-Cover year. So apparently I passed over a lot of the synths and a lot of GUIs that just aren’t to my liking. No offense to any dev who I might have overlooked through my aesthetic prejudiced - let me know if I completely missed the boat on your offering.

A couple of off-the-cuff notes:

- I was most looking forward to hypercyclic & The Element of Surprise. Both have proved to be worthy of my anticipation.

- I especially like the conceptual approach of Sounds of Nature & Element of Surprise. (Coincidence?)

- Again with tEoS: Really, read the manual. Even if you don’t grock with the sound, it’s a good piece of writing and a helpful approach to actually getting music done.

- Sometimes concept and results part ways. A few of those that I’ve tried have proved this sadly true.

- Since I’ve purge my VST folders and cleaned up my audio drive, I’m testing everything out of eXT2 rather than Sonar or P5.

- Except hypercyclic which I’m using in Sonar because of its internal MIDI-routing.

- The “?” isn’t the name of a plugin (someone snap that up for next year!) but means I might have downloaded one or two others but either they didn’t install correctly or I they got lost in the purge. The list reflects my notes so far.

And a special call out to one of my readers with a Mac: Have you tried the mac plugins? Do they work? Are they useful?

While not available for sale, the product page for Audio Damage’s next slice of DSP goodness, is available for you to puzzle and drool over.

It’s a diffusion chorus - which is a new one on me. I’m not even going to attempt to try to explain it; i.e. I have no frame of reference. Suffice to say, there’s probably nothing in the plugin market that is like this.

While Audio Damage gets ready to unleash the next and final plugin in its mod trilogy, I’ve had a chance to put their last creation, Fluid, to the test.

As I said previously, my experience with chorus units has either been of the cheap(er) guitar pedal variety or whatever came bundled with my software or “onboard” with my softsynths. In other words, the expected watery wooshing. In other words, something I didn’t use deliberately very much. In other words, it’s certainly been on synth patches or amp I’ve used but I’ve never thought to myself, “Gee, you know what this needs is a chorus.”

But the first thing I strapped Fluid across sounded so markedly better it was really quite astounding. I was working on a remix project, so the synth pad was already a fixed audio file, and since I was stripping the track of all its more traditional rock/pop elements, I was shifting the focus to the synth parts. I routed all the synth pads to a bus and put Fluid in the bus FX. As the attached audio clip of the solo’d bus track demonstrates, a fairly static synth part became a swirling, harmonically rich sound.

Fluid on the Synth Bus

Note about the demo clip. This is a synth bus, but after I heard how beautifully Fluid gave movement to the track, I sent the vocal “double” to the track as well. I was originally going to remove the vocal for this demo clip, but listening to it I thought it would be far more interesting to leave it in, to hear what Fluid did to both parts. While in the dry clip the vocal is slightly more “present,” keep in mind that this isn’t the “main” vocal bus, so the slightly blurring of the transients doesn’t really effect the full mix. But what is noticeable to me is that the vocal part of that bus doesn’t just get washed into the rest of the sound on that bus. So while the synths take on a more characterful sound, the vocal retains its clarity.

Well, what were you gonna do with that money anyway?

link via gearslutz.

Not my particular poison but people swear by it. So this seems helpful, right?

Still don’t get the name, but, whatever.

The AudioDamage plugin bonanza continues. This one is called Fluid. It is a chorus.

“A chorus” I hear you say. Shrug, right. Well apparently not. If you read this page on Chris’s analogindustries site you’ll see it’s all about a lushness of sound that you don’t hear recreated very often, and apparently mostly exists in high-end boutique gear. I mostly know it from crappy guitar pedals, so this may be a treat.

I’m just acting as a conduit for marketing at this point since I haven’t tried it. But, as with these completely reasonable prices, really, why not? I have a job. And no kids. Is it the missing quality that will give my music the sheen it so desperately cries out for. Unlikely, but I bet it sounds great on vocals.

And in the above thread Chris lets drop that the next in the trilogy will be “Vapor” and I have no idea what that will be other than to make things sound airy. I can’t imagine they’re doing an exciter.