Plug-in of the Month

[IIO]

in this thread i will upload one plug-in per month, in no particular order, effective as of today.

the plug-ins have been published on the one or other form already 15-20 years ago, but most of you will probably never have seen them.

the format is pluggo, which means that they require the free runtime from cycling74.

the pluggo runtime will install a single supporting files subfolder in /system extensions and have no effect on the operation of your host program unless you load the first pluggo plug-in. if you do, it might take a few secodns to load the runtime for the first plug-in in a session, similar to the initialisation process of a powercore or UAD card.

unless otherwise noted, they will run as RTAS, MAS and VST.
 
 

[IIO]

02/2023

Mid/Side Encoder & Decoder
 
 
how to use:

insert the encoder before and the decoder after one (or more) stereo processor(s), which you want to use in M/S mode.

the plug-in does not have a GUI and no parameters. to switch between M/S and stereo, just turn the processing (for both plug-ins) on and off in the host program.

[Philgood]

Thanks a lot.
I only know the application of M/S in recording with stereo-mics.
Didn’t know you can get quite creative when mixing.

[IIO]

it is quite common as option in mastering EQs and dynamics processors, and it is the basis of stereo wideners & co.

but feel free to abuse for everything else.

in MacOS9 it is almost exclusively present in the waves plug-ins.

having individual MS plug-ins is also great for learning what it is about and how it works; just listen to different material after the encoder.

simple and effective tech. hail gerzon.

[ssp3]

Does it reduce gain when going from L/R -> M/S?

[Protools5LEGuy]

Does it reduce gain when going from L/R -> M/S?

It should depend on the Pan Law it uses. Could be -3 or -4.5 or -6 dB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_law

The interesting thing with L/R to M/S conversions is to treat mono and sides with different sonic routes.

[IIO]

no pan law or weighting.

the only thing i do is *0.999 in the encoder. irrelevant nerdstuff for technical use cases only.
 
 
btw. they should work in OSX, too, as long as we are in a 32 bit architecture. instead of MAS, AU is supported.
for OSX there is no free runtime, but you can install the free "pluggo junior".

[ssp3]

IIRC, Waves did (2.x - 3).
I am seeing all sorts of weird things on more recent systems with various dedicated M/S decoders. Just load Bitter after them. I'm not sure if I should trust them. 

[IIO]

if it is built-in into a plug-in it can make sense to set the side to a higher amplitude so that you can make use of the controls of the plug-in in a similar manner between M and S.

but otoh, then you dont really see how loud the channels are and that is not very useful.

it is also a philosophical problem. because changing the gain of either channel creates a drastic effect itself. it is only one of many use cases. if you need this, use waves S1´s vertical controller. it does exactly that, mixing M and S against each other.
or use a 2-channel gain plug-in on your M/S signal.

a proper encoder should do (a+b)/2 and (a-b)/2 and nothing else.
only then you can be sure you dont touch the amplitude relations when you insert 2 identical filters. all you have to do is to set the volume parameter in the filters to the same level for L and R (which are now M and S), and the matrix of the output will be identical to the input.

i have also seen all kind of weird stuff by industry guys who should know it better. trust is good, control is better!

[Nesufire]

Would Soft Synths/Samplers with Instruments count under this category? Would be killer to see an upload of Bitheadz Unity DS-1 with it's original banks still present. that is if anyone has them. I've been interested in older mac vsts/samplers for a long time. already have ISO rips of a bunch of Samplecell format discs myself. I'd be pleased to upload them but I'm not entirely sure if I have permission from the original ripper of these discs to do so.

[Nesufire]

I have been inquiring the 200 mb sampleset for the Unity DS-1 sampler because I'm in a large community for video game instrument origins (1700+ Members if I recall) that has been searching for a copy for a few years due to it's confirmed usage via the composer that it was used heavily in a video game called "Spyro the Dragon" The full Unity Session would be preferred but anything with complete contents works. Thanks a bunch!

[ssp3]

Would Soft Synths/Samplers with Instruments count under this category?

Probably not, unless IIO coded something of this kind. Starting your own thread would be better.

[IIO]

i made like 100 or so instruments, but the question is if they would be worth sharing.

if you have some patience, we might see the one or other here, though.

for now we start slooowly with small technical utilities and midi plug-ins and a few other things which are not available otherwise (which is the main idea behind rolling your own, isn´t it?).

i found the GUI for the MS, so please download again.

[IIO]

03/2023

ReSend=
 
send and receive audio anywhere in your host program.
 
 
possible applications:

 - use regular mixer channels as (additional) subgroups

 - send subgroups back to regular channels

 - split channels for parallel processing
 
 
how to use:

the sender plug-ins have dynamic targets (4 stereo groups), the insert plug-ins have fixed IDs. this should prevent you from creating feedbackloops too easily - but you can still do that by not understanding how your host program works.

for parallel processing (copying the channel elsewhere while keeping the audio on the channel) you have to use the splitter plug-in, as the sender plug-in always mutes the channel it takes the audio from.

you can always send multiple streams to the same insert, the audio will simply be summed.

in logic audio inter plug-in streaming causes unpredictable latencies and you might sometimes need to reload a sender plug-in when the project is opened the next time. there is nothing i can do against this.

[IIO]

04/2023

Bankomat

one of the first i ever made. a multitap delay with resonators/bandpassfilters... with a highly questionable parameter scaling.

[Protools5LEGuy]

3 in a row !

Thanks !

Post made sticky

[Protools5LEGuy]

I´m looking for a loudness meter plugin (vst / au, or both) capable to measure in LUFS that can be installed on 10.5. Does such a thing even exist? LUFS became a standard loudness measure circa 2012, I think. So it may exist for PPC or not. Any info will be very appreciated. Thanks!

Could you give us in the future a LUFS vumeter?

Math needed is a root square per channel

Check http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,6736.msg51236.html#msg51236 post for the exact aproach.

[Protools5LEGuy]

After reading the paper twice I think it would be dificult to implement anything but stereo LUFS meter, and even that stereo is really hard to implement with as much "fps" or measurements per second as the modern solutions has just because of the brute CPU power we have today.

Thanks IIO for the hawk-eye vision.

[IIO]

i know how to do it, but it is a bit laborious in OS9 and in my existing plug-in i dont fully follow the specs.

given that when i started this the EBU R128 was not even in sight and the struggle between a-weighting and k-weighting was not yet fought out.

i used FFT for both, L-a and L-k... but i might change the k-weighting to IIR or FIR filters, then it will be less labourious (for the cost of more CPU)

note that - just as with stereo to surround matrix conversion or dithering - loudness correction is one of the cases where it would be better to make standalones only, because you can easily use it wrong when you have it as plug-ins.

apropos "stereo". normally you do it per channel, as you say, and that is cool because then you can see and treat the gain per channel. but for the "loudness issue" itself and for normal stereo format (i.e. not encoded surround) you can also work with summed to mono.

the more difficult task today is to find out what certain broadcasters actually want and for what formats, because it is different between compressed and uncompressed, between DTS:Neo and dolby E as well as between german and austrian TV stations. and between music and speech, for that matter.

and relative to inter-samplepeaks? seriously? just substract another -0.3db (or -0.35 for compressed) from the value you should go, and you should be fine.

maybe it shows up here in 6 weeks, but i dont promise a certain order.

as you can guess, i do not play the "monthly" game to annoy you but to force myself to make fresh builds and libraries and correct bugs in the GUI´n stuff. it is about time after 20 years.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Time is running Out...