Month: January 2013

So, after realising that I REALLY REALLY REALLY needed to release AAX yesterday, I now have done! Installers are up on the dmgaudio site, and everything gets a version number bump (because there are fixes too!)

Edit: There’s always something. A really odd DSP error slipped through the cracks, and if you downloaded within the first hour after the announcement, you might experience issues with EQuality, particularly in Digital+ mode. If so, just re-download. The updated versions are up already.

Changes:

All:
– AAX version included
– Tweaks for stability
– VST3 Automation improvements
– Mac builds and Installers optimised and signed
– Massive optimise for reload of presets.

EQuality v1.17->1.18
– Improve HPFs.

EQuick v1.02->1.03
– Fix click-thru menubar bug
– Fix reset-to-previous after resetting to default bug.
– Recalibrate VU meter
– Make graph textboxes usable to engage automation in ProTools.

Compassion v1.06->1.07
– Fix Clip-Limiter denormal issue

PitchFunk v1.02->1.03
– Fixed rare redraw issue
– Improved Loading process
– Added pagetable for ProTools automation

Enjoy!

Dave.

Lots of people ask me questions about audio. This is probably no great surprise. If anyone has any questions they’d like me to blog about, post ’em here, and we’ll get some explainings going on 😀

New EQ – working on it.

It has ALL THE THINGS, and it’s so sexy that I can’t compare it to previous EQ plugins. It’s more like an EQ platform, from the future. It oozes with power, and it does EVERYTHING. Surround support is in too, which I’m especially pleased about, despite it being one of the nerdier, techier features. DSP is complete- all the hardware models are in and good, parallel modes in, phase modes extended, etc.

AAX – literally ready to ship. I’m trying to decide whether to release it as-is, or hold back and include some more bug fixes. I just re-read that sentence, and I should clearly release AAX straight away. I’ll get on that now.

Beardytron- preparing for the TED talk next month, Daz is coming to DMGAudio HQ out here in Cornwall for a week of hacking and fixing.

Other things… Are there other things? Does anyone still read this blog?

Oh, yes, apparently Krzysztof is making tutorial videos. Awesomely excited about that. 😀

Dave.

This post is a copy&paste from a comment I posted on KVR where someone was arguing that 384kHz oversampling is a prerequisite for acceptably low levels of aliasing:

Oversampling a linear process (EQ) offers no benefit in terms of aliasing, because there isn’t any aliasing to get rid of.

Oversampling a time-variant process up to 2x is worthwhile, assuming an audio-rate (or lower) modulator, because you then have two spectra worth of audio content convolved together (spectrally speaking); I usually include dynamics in this category, since if your sidechain signal is generating a gain reduction signal that contains faster-than-audio-rate content, you are concerning yourself with compression-as-distortion, rather than compression as dynamics. I’ll take the point that the switch between attack and release might fall into this category, but as a designer of dynamics, we’d want to make that transition as smooth as possible. Or things would sound bad (e.g. Gate chatter, for instance).

Oversampling distortion is one easy way to ‘improve’ the sound of a naive distortion. Or even to add a little finesse to a good one. But of course, the degree of oversampling that’s beneficial is a function of the nature of the distortion, and how hard you hit it.
I’d like to speculate that most worthwhile, modern distortions are designed around an implicit oversampling-type process; runge-kutta being a good, topical example. But there are plenty of naive distortions around, and without oversampling, they sound terrible. I don’t know how it’s still a thing, but seemingly it is. I suppose the key factor is that aliasing is ALWAYS going to be a LOT quieter than signal, so it’s going to remain “grab the spec analyser” kind of problem. (Except in Massive, where the aliasing is what makes it good)

Rant over.

Dave.