alex's Forum Page

– Open a new project
– Right click on the empty area below the master track header and create a new track
– Click on “source” in the new track header and choose a vsti
– Grab the pencil tool (at the top of the screen) and click on the first bar of the new track (it should turn blue)
– Click on the editor button at the bottom of the screen
– Click on the keyboard that shows up

Any sound?

@The Telenator wrote:

LimiterNo6 is a keeper but I must confess I’m not completely ‘at home’ with it yet. Did you look over the fancy stuff it will do? — ordering of the separate modules, 4X sampling but only if set a certain way, CPU savings if set such and such? Blah, blah, blah. I’d really rather use the quaint old Russian GUI on that, but it makes me distracted and takes up a little too much of my efforts.

I can only tell you I’m gonna stick with the old GUI. I’m sure this plugin will be really useful to me when I get my head around it. It’s gonna take quite some time, I suspect.

@The Telenator wrote:

What I really want to post about just now concerns our talking about testing new plugins. I have basically a 3-stage process. Like you, I look at CPU and basic stability …..

Yes, we do pretty much the same thing.

@The Telenator wrote:

Regarding ‘usual suspects’ — for free instruments and especially the awesome assortment of synths out there that they have for us, I’m pretty well settled too. Although I have a few of the ‘celebrity’ free synths out there, at various points I always come back to the freeware softsynths such as Synth1 and Oatmeal.

Those two are the only ones I use all the time and my go to sampler is Shortcircuit. I still have to learn a looooooot about midi. Luckily, my music is 100% emulation of the live performance, and I can get away with a good sample or synth preset (which makes mixing much more important to me, and much more interesting, to be honest). Unfortunately, I don’t owe a bass guitar anymore, so I have go midi for that too. For guitar, I use amp simulators or my old Digitech GNX1, since I can’t record my Marshall at home. Now, I (kinda) can tweak those soft knobs and everything, but I don’t actually know what I’m doing all the time and I’m really still a beginner. It’s no excuse, I know, but I play guitar for more than 30 years (about 25 as a pro, 5 as studio guitarist), piano was the first instrument I learned, so midi, for me, is something that I have to use (I don’t hate it anymore, I even kinda like the possibilities but it’s still not really my thing). Anyway, I talk an awful lot and still haven’t answered your question:

@The Telenator wrote:

I’d rather know a small handful of great free synths really well than to spend half my life learning the confusing inner secrets of the much-touted Sylenth. How about you?

That’s exactly what I think 😀

Sorry, I know nothing about that compressor. By the way, I don’t owe c1, but I remember I was quite disappointed by that limitation when I was using it in other people’s studios. Anyway, maybe someone else can help you about that other one.

By the way, if you’re interested in freeware you can check this thread (pages 3,4 and 5 – we discussed a lot of free compressors and limiters, lately):

http://www.zynewave.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=575

Cheers

@The Telenator wrote:

You mention another good point, too — not only is there plenty of quality freeware, but almost every week now (part of what takes a lot of my time in chasing them down), some formerly commercial and reputable plugin becomes freeware. That’s about a third maybe of my current freebies

The JB Bundle, by Jason Breebardt (sp?) is now being offered free.

It’s Jeroen Breebaart. Yes, I ran into that bundle about a week ago and launched the thread immediately. I knew about those plugins for a while, and was really happy because they became free.

I also use some formerly commercial stuff (great quality, low cpu usage).

@The Telenator wrote:

I look at latency as well as CPU use. Some are ridiclous.

I really don’t hesitate to delete a perfectly good plugin if it’s too hungry (except if I need it on mix buses or for mastering, I’ve already said that).

I think the only thing that make most of the great free plugins inferior to commercial ones is CPU usage. Sometimes they are even better than lot of their commercial competitors, but so hungry that they become almost useless (don’t matter how powerful machine one has).
I must say that my most hungry commercial plugin (it’s a channel strip – eq, compressor, gate) works at 4% (in Podium free), while some of our favorite free compressors are hitting 12 to 14, just like that. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is.

I really don’t want to spend too much time chasing and testing new plugins. I’ll manage to narrow my free vst list to 40 – 50 plugins and with a modest number of commercial plugins that will be all I’m going to use. Two things:

1. When I grab an eq it’s always one of my 5 favorite ones, compressor – same thing, maybe 7 or 8 together with limiters and so on.

2. Almost all of plugins that I use are out there for quite some time, they’re stable, they sound great and I know them inside out.

So, now I see it this way – every once in a while I like to find a new plugin and play with it for some time, but I always come back to my old plugins when I do some serious work.

And that brings me to a conclusion. I think everything’s gone far enough or maybe even as far as it gets. I mean, they can’t invent something really new so easily, can they? It’s not necessary a bad thing imo – what we can use for free or buy now is already great quality, and I can’t imagine it can be far better or different. What do you think about that?

@The Telenator wrote:

Finally, I should warn: that Strings1 (aka Orchestral Strings), made by the KVR forum #2-rated PianoOne people that is featured in this years KVR Developers’ Challenge 2012 . . . DOES NOT WORK. What a waste of fooling with 200+ MB of VSTi and samples. Doesn’t work right for anybody.

Tnx for the warning

@The Telenator wrote:

I think RoughRider is great on some drum tracks, real snap and so easy to use.

I like it more and more every day, it pumps and bites, but go a bit easier on it and it ain’t such a beast anymore, and it brings such a warm color either way. Only 2% cpu. That one stays for good.

LimiterNo6 is great one. Advanced tool (just like Molot). I’ve spent some time tweaking it today and was very happy with results. Tnx for suggesting it.

Cheers

Just check the Quality/CPU button on Ambience. 😉 It’s actually a trade off – quality of reverb for cpu. Can be usefull, really. NastyDLA is a great plugin. Yes, I must check that limiter. Hard to find a good one. I like W1. Adds quite a bit of color, even though they say it’s transparent (it’s a clone of waves L1). Check it out if you haven’t (I linked both versions in this thread). And also, jb barricade pro is now free (that bundle is just so great). Actually, it’s not so hard to find a good limiter anymore. 😀

What keeps me from using Variety Of Sound plugins (and I like them so much) is that some of them are really cpu hungry (and epicVerb is one of those). So, I use Densitymklll, because it’s so hard to find a good master bus compressor (and I like Molot even better (the matter of personal preference), but it’s also really hungry plugin, maybe even more than Densitymklll). So, no cure for it (in the freeware world) – if one wants to mix into a dedicated bus compressor, there’s the price to be paid 🙂 (not the money but cpu)

@kim_otcj wrote:

I had similar sorts of problems with epicVerb (and several other Variety of Sound plugins — I can’t persuade BootEQ to do anything at all). I’m using the Lexicon Pantheon II reverb these days, but for a while I was using Ambience, which I found to be pretty stable:

http://magnus.smartelectronix.com/#Ambience

I use BootEQmkll with no problems and it’s rather normal on cpu (I know this doesn’t help much).

Ambience is a really good one. It’s one of, let’s say, 5 to 7 reverbs I’m gonna keep in my library. It has that Quality/CPU button….. 😉

A bit about Molot. I find it usable only in stereo mode on the master bus, as I’ve already said (it does great all the other stuff, of coarse, but if you need a side chain compressor or a channel compressor, choose another one, or you’re gonna run out of computer juice very soon).
This is very important – if you use Molot, change dither from default high (20 bit) to low (24 bit). Maybe you like the air high dither brings, but some weird shit may happen when you use some other dither algorithm at the end.

I’m off topic, I know, but, since I was the one who started talking about Molot in this thread, I have to say what I found out about it (before I forget to do it :))

Of coarse, I like to have something that adds character and color on the master bus, which is not what everybody likes. That makes Reacomp well worth trying – it glues really nicely and is very transparent. Red Phatt Pro is another great option, since it’s free now. No cpu problems with those two.

@alex wrote:

I’m still checking this one – it’s a dual band, and it’s meant for mastering, but I think one can really mix into it:

http://www.digitalfishphones.com/main.php?item=2&subItem=3

I’m done checking it. It’s a killer, both as a mixing and a mastering tool.

Cheers

Mverb?

You want believe this 😯

I finally got it and it worked. Then I added the presets folder (don’t ask me why I did it) and Podium crashed. I removed the preset folder and Podium loaded the plugin again, as if it wasn’t already there. After that, the plugin started pushing the volume to infinite as soon as it received any signal or if I just touched anything on the GUI. Deleted, reinstalled, and it works again. I don’t know how the stinking presets folder can cause something like that.

edited to add:

The extra presets are in a specific format and must be converted. I don’t care to that, but maybe someone else does.