Topic: BEST IN SHOW

I want to caution readers that the 55 offerings here are all in some stage of BETA. A couple of these don’t work at all, a few others don’t work correctly. One of them I tried — a plugin that claims to be a tube-emulation warmth-addition onward to tube overdrive — shook my system to its core when scanned and changed the color of my UI on REAPER temporarily (until I removed that plugin and ran it through my file shredder).

The VOS ThrillseekerXTC (exciter-type plugin using their latest ‘stateful saturation’ technology) seems to work just fine, as you would expect from an outfit such as VOS, and I did find a bundle of presets by rmus7 quite useful for a couple of VSTi’s I use, but otherwise, you have been warned. I suggest most of these are not so needful or earth-shattering that they can’t wait until fully tested and released later. Good luck — you’ll need it.

Always too tempted by new audio software, I went into this list and tested a few. The synths Kamioooka and Poly 2106 (and including its sister synth Prodigious) work quite well and were fun to try out. Kamioooka is a modular setup with cable you can connect, much like u-he’s ACE. The Poly 2106 is along the lines of the several Juno emulations out there, very sweet and VA-sounding.

I also tested ThrillseekerXTC, best described as an exciter. It is fantastic. A plugin that you will want to at least try on some of your tracks, especially if you have no good unit of this sort in your arsenal.

Orchestral Strings One, as I posted elsewhere, did not work at all for me and others who posted. The tube saturation effect, AXP Softamp 3OD, seemed wonderful in the way it is structured yet nearly crashed my entire PC, so beware of that one — really too bad for something that looks so promising. I call it outright dangerous to your DAW. The collection of patches for various synths by rmus7 are great. Do grab those if you have any of the 5 or 6 VSTi’s he’s made them for.

I also tested and kept a copy of the very interesting collaboration of Vladg Sound (Molot, LimiterNo6) and Tokyo Dawn Labs (many, many VST’s) in the plugin called Proximity. It has to do with quite what its name states. I’m seeing these kinds of specialty plugins pop up a lot lately.

AXP, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you contacted. Let me post the basics here, for our other readers as well, and when time allows I’ll reach you privately if needed.

Your OD plugin looked right away to me to be one of the most promising of its sort. Only one other I know of allows choice of tube (and I think that one was a full amp sim if I recall). I felt your controls on the plugin were of a more intelligent design as well.

All of my exploration of your VST came on REAPER, one of the most resistant DAWs in existence to crashing from plugin use. Although Podium here is a personal favourite, I tend to experiment with all the new stuff and potential problems on REAPER first because it is so forgiving.

I launched your plug three times there. It did seem that this DAW took a somewhat long time to scan it into the cache when I performed a ‘clear cache’ and re-scan of all. Not sure. I then was eager to try it, so I proceeded to place it on a track. Then the surprise. REAPER ‘fluttered’, the entire screen went black for a moment. My first thought was, well, this plug is crashing REAPER (something that is a rather rare event, if you follow the forum over there).

But instead of going to blue screen as most users’ systems do, or a frozen screen as my PC will instead, the DAW came back up to functioning; however, I saw right away some very unusual graphics display. I should mention I had no other plugins or tracks going; I was using a most basic setup just to try your plugin. I can’t find any other factors to account for what happened. Apparently, the plugin had turned to colour black many of the frames and window portions of REAPER. Suddenly I’m looking at a very different skin! (I was using the reliable Rado-VOX skin the first test and Rado-darko the next two, both skins that have had no bug reports in the 2 or so years they have been in existence.)

My first thought was, Oh, this is very bad. I’ve had plugins crash a DAW and PC, I’ve experienced all the usual that all of us have, but never the odd screen flutter, partial or temporary shutdown or crash, then a return to function with several areas turned to black. Being not much of a gambler or risk-taker, I left off with anything further regarding your plugin, and instead (after fully removing it from its folder) returned to REAPER to make sure everything went back to normal and that there was no permanent damage done, which I can say happily there was none (afaik).

As you should be well aware, there are always several products among the many in these annual KVR shows that somehow misfire. The Orchestral Strings One (same outfit as the #2 all-time rated by KVR, the PIanoOne) didn’t work at all. It would load its 500Mb and make only one ugly sound. Reports are it has since been fixed. And there were a few other issues with plugins this year as well.

I use my DAWs — Podium, REAPER, Ableton Live 8 — everything in 32-bit on a Win7 64-bit machine with all SSE certificates, tonnes of HDD space and 2.2 gig dual core Intel. Not a newbie to anything really either. I have tested and used some 500 or more plugins of every sort at this point, currently maintaining 40 instruments and about 80 of my favourite effects plugins, all both freeware and now up to about 35% commercial these days. I have pretty much seen it all. Used to use Cubase 4 also, before leaving them because of 4’s constant plugin issues and other matters.

I thought the basic design of your new OD plugin was brilliant actually, from the minute I looked over the UI and saw what you were doing with this. Both for tracking, using various saturation plugins, and guitar, having several of the popular OD plugins for use with S-Gear amps, I find the best of this variety of plugins indispensable.

I’ve been hoping that your plugin has some very minor weird bit of code to it that can be spotted and fixed. I have never seen a plugin have the ability to do what yours did — both ‘flutter’ the PC screen then replace colours in any DAW. Again, as regards plugins, REAPER is well-known to be most forgiving of practically any DAW. I did not want to risk it but wondered if a full crash would have resulted trying this on another. Sorry, but I can’t offer any unusual info here — my setup is very normal and stable with no odd features to report. Best wishes with this. I’d love to employ your plugin at some later date!

Cheers!
Tele

AXP, your response has emboldened me to some degree. I’m not at my recording laptop currently but will check and confirm all you requested.

I downloaded the plugin directly from the DC2012 link. Do check it with Rado-darko skin as well if you get a chance. It’s really a slimmer variation of the VOX skin and very much worth trying on for size. I can’t decide which of the two I like best. Both display excellent layouts and controls on the tracks, conservative but pleasant graphics and colour opportunities.

I’ve grown so curious now, as I can tell you’ve got an inherently clever design and character to this plugin. I’m familiar with most of what’s available in this type. Among some of my dev friends, perfect tube simulation is one of the badges of honor, proving you have ‘arrived’ to the top echelons of design (but I expect you knew this). Another is impeccable UI design, which I saw in your plugin. Do have a look at Frits’ UI for Podium if you haven’t already — another outstanding creation.

This topic falls as much under DAW-related news as it does anything else. I expect no worries in this department. I try to post relevant news bits that I think will interest Podium users when time allows, especially items not well-published or known at time of posting. Many of us here are various grades of starving artist or the frugal, so freeware tends to draw our interest strongly!

In any case, your first possible explanation sounded very likely. I might say, that’s a bit what it ‘looked like’. On my end, I did recall that I have been running my graphics clock 20MHz lower than spec (toying with a kernel experiment lately), but still loading such a light to average UI shouldn’t have made my graphics chip climb to the max in any case. Ah, but then one never knows. I’ve reset it to the factory numbers now. Of course, the planets may have been in alignment that evening too, and I wasn’t informed of that either. So dodgy these PCs at times, but when you have them humming along perfectly . . .

I’m feeling up to trying it again. I’ve seen worse things happen after all. I was able to repeat the occurrence, so perhaps I can again. I’ve had very smooth sailing with that particular PC for months now, so I can’t account for it otherwise. I will look into all this once I’m on the other machine this evening. I never knew back when I converted to digital that we’d have to be part detective from time to time.

Cheers!

Thank you for your continuing interest and support. The version that you’ve downloaded (1.0.2) should be fine for testing, since 1.0.3 only has a fix for one particular feature, that is irrelevant to your problem. But if it does work, I encourage you to move on to 1.0.3 right away. In addition, I’ve prepared a special version for you without any GUI, here it is:
https://sites.google.com/site/thesoftamp/AXP_SoftAmp_3OD_1_0_3_NoGUI.zip
Most probably it will work like that, but you actually loose a lot of the plugin’s ‘feel’ if you run it without the UI. I agree with you that interface plays just as important role as what’s under the hood.

I’ve discovered this D.C. just a month before the submission deadline and immediately thought it was a great opportunity to actually start releasing the stuff I’ve been working on for quite a while by myself. If I had more time, hopefully we wouldn’t need this sort of beta-testing with a number of updates in just one month.

Looking forward for update from you.
/AXP

Hi Tele,

I’m kinda used to the time difference, because the company I work for has an HQ in the U.S.
After reading about you having good and bad news I thought you were going to say the interface worked fine, but the sound sucks 🙂
Glad to hear that you like it. In fact it’s based on the generally acclaimed tube modeling approach, but the real trick is that it’s very computationally efficient. Plus I’ve got a very fast oversampling engine, which I’ve spent a lot of time on perfecting it out. It takes about 230 CPU cycles to process a single mono sample without oversampling and less than 3500 samples with 16x oversampling, which includes 16 executions of the triode processing loop as well as 2 passess of the antialiasing filter, making it sub-linear in performance.

I would definitely like to see the screenshots. There are contact details in the plugin’s ‘about’ page (just click the logo). I am still not able to reproduce it. Reaper’s “clear cache and rescan” completes perfectly, on 5 different PC I’ve got. It works even through the remote desktop session! I’ve also got a trial version of Cantabile 2.0 and it works just fine as well. I think I’ve got Ableton Live bundled with my audio interface, so I’m going to test it too. Moreover, I’ve tested it with some audio editors – Audition 2.0 and Ocenaudio 2.0 with both working without a glitch. It even works through a wrapper in the Foobar player. There must be something very specific about your configuration that escapes me.
May I ask you to run ‘msinfo32’ on your PC and then save and mail me its output? (alternatively it’s in Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information)

About the clicks when changing the parameters. Actualy it was even worse in the beginning, but I’ve implemented a quick workaround in 1.0.1 that somewhat alleviated the issue. Well, it still sounds better than swapping real-life tubes would 🙂 The reason for clicks is that different tube models will have different bias points and circuit capacitors need some time to settle on a new one. If you look at the output signal in the editor, you’ll see that such transients look exacly like they would in the real life.

Pushed by your report though I’ve just spend an evening working on the proper solution and now I can say that it’s resolved completely. I’ll release the new version shortly.

I smiled while reading that the Gain knob is causing pops too. In fact ‘leds’ have nothing to do with the actual value. The knob has 100 internal steps from 0.0 to 1.0. The value is truncated for display, but the full precision is used for controlling the DSP part. What you’ve actually encountered I think is that the gain is very sensitive to mouse movement and each pixel of vertical movement causes a significant dB change. You can check if it’s smooth enough by using the automation input.

I would be grateful if you could spread this piece of software around, but let’s iron out those bugs first 🙂
Meanwhile I’m working on some more stuff, because obviously this one is going to be just a building block for more serious things which you might be also interested in.

So yeah, send me your screenshots and system info log, and keep looking for updates.

Thanks again,
/AXP

Hello Again, AXP,

An out-of-town gig this weekend, so I am just now getting myself back together in one piece here. Let me answer your post sort of helter skelter and cover the important things.

First, I know precisely the most perfect place to start announcing the SoftAmp 3OD plugin once things are all good to go. That friend I was telling you about, Mike, owns the fantastic S-Gear package of 3 boutique software amps and accompanying effects. Now, to achieve the heaviest modern electric guitar sound — whether real metal or just of the Led Zep variety of heavy — his amps require one more level of quality boost loaded in front of the amp used, just like almost all of them do. We have had many discussions on his amp forum and elsewhere about which is best. Good sim amps will take a real floor pedal or any software clone of one on the front end. So we’ve all been running around the Net scooping up the best to try each. There are a few good ones but only one or two that could currently be called ‘great’. I just picked up the clone of the ProCo Rat and it sounds pretty good. The only truly great ones I have so far is the Fuzz Face and the Rangemaster clones. The two tube screamers are just a bit above average.

I tell you, every guitarist who today uses an amp sim is going to want to try your 3OD. For one, most of us understand things like plate voltages, tube type and even .22uF vs .47uF (if you play a Fender guitar which uses precisely those values!). Although there is no way I’m throwing out my software Fuzz Face, your plugin will be seen as an authentic attempt to model and make usable preamp tubes. Now that I know the sound well also, part of what took so long the other day, I fully trust you will have a winner with this. As I said, it sounds excellent. The gain structure of each goes from basically imperceptible up very smoothly to the real ‘pushed tube’ sound. Many of the real-tube pedals on the market have been flops because they run at best only 9 or 12 volts through the tube. That’s nearly useless. It doesn’t create real tube overdrive, and they are more of a gimmick than anything.

Starting there, and here, and certainly at the REAPER forum also where there is a very large number of guitarists, starting a thread about this will attract much attention. If at all possible a screen shot at 100% or down to 2/3 of this plugin’s GUI will make it irresistible. (Just got it) When the guitarists see the tubes and voltage choices, if they notice the intense 16X oversampling ability, I really think most of them will go nuts over it. And again, it sounds perfect for a front-of-amp boost stage. This potential at the amp website forums only dawned on me after you mentioned getting the word out.

I wasn’t suggesting the minor clicking and the activation of the LED-like lights on the gain was a 1:1 correspondence, but it almost seems that way!

I have now the configuration details you asked for. I scanned it briefly and saw nothing irregular or concerning, but if you do, please let me know. I gave up programming and coding back in about ’80 when it was all that terribly boring Pascal and COBOL, business software that could bore even the nerdiest PC major to tears. Wish I’d had a crystal ball then but no serious regrets. In any case, I’m not the expert. You may see something. I have a tech guy but haven’t had any work for him aside from a quick checkup in two years. We have joked, however, that the recording laptop, the ASUS, might truly be haunted or perhaps enchanted, because it normally performs much better than I think it should. It’s not a MacBook Pro. Aside from stripping out some bloatware when I bought it, and streamlining it some further for recording use only, the only other real change I have made is that I have it set for a +33% turbo on the cores when I want it, which I do use quite a lot these days. No overheating or any side effects, though.

I should recap simply by saying that your SoftAmp plugin is the only VST that has caused any real problem in any DAW in something like nine months to a year, so it did concern me especially before you released those revisions. After I finished customizing my audio and DAWs setup late last year, it’s been extremely smooth sailing. This ASUS without a doubt has been the best computer I’ve used or owned yet.

I think that if there will be any pop or clicking sounds remaining because of the normal functioning of the plugin that a sentence about that should be included in a ReadMe or manual if it ends up with one. I mean something beyond the minor level of clicking in the Gain knob.

I think I may just post those screen shots here in the next minute or so. But soon after, assuming no further distractions today, I will head over to your web page and send you the config32. Talk to you later!

Cheers!