so, whats on the horizon?

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After a rather frosty start into 2010 everything is slowly warming up here again and of course all the audio plug-in connoisseurs out there – aka gearslutz aka you – deserves some more answers on the stuff that really matters: Where are the updates, whats next and more important when and obligatory: why no [add your favourite vintage brand here] emulation?

Thanks to the NAMM show this winter the last one is a really easy one and thats just because that if whatsoever vintage stuff wasn’t already emulated in DSP then it will be probably up to the end of this year by some company. Or it was already available and we will see the fifth replica. Or we get another emulation of an emulation. Or the same stuff with some fancy endorsement? Everything more accurate, of course! You get the picture and I’m skipping this rant for now (but maybe just to stress this in another article, since the lack of innovation as a whole is that much annyoing to me).

That said, in my own lab there actually wasn’t any emulation of anything breeding during the last year and so it won’t be this year (and so please stop asking me for doing any xyz emulation, thanks). But there maybe appear some or some other rather old school circuit concept combined altogether with some clever and much more modern DSP invention again – whatever that might be. Fortunately, besides this rather hazy prediction there is a more clear short-term forecast for the very first quarter this year:

In January, the already awaited major update for the epicVerb digital reverb simulator will arrive and it will not only feature some bugfixes and stability improvements but also some re-worked algorithms which are supporting faster density build up, increased diffusion and better depth perception. But some users might mourn over this update since it ditches now the support for the old computer dinosaurs: this release will require  SSE2 (or higher) and there won’t be any official support for the older SSE cpu types anymore in general.

To be clear, this means that other already released (currently just Density mkII) or to be released stuff will require SSE2 (or higher) and I do not care about SSE any more from now on. To me, this step seemed to be long overdue while looking at a 10 years old technology and given that more and more people are already demanding for future SSE3, 64bit support or suchlike. I’ve already planned to touch those topics in an article somewhere later,  to have a glimpse on the horizon where future development trends might lead.

In February, the beta for the FerricTDS update is planned to begin and this is not just to add one single additional input volume switch or something. There was a little delay on the update already due to some technical issues occuring in last December but, to it’s advantage, meanwhile some more improvements found it’s way already into this gadget which will amend the sound of some circuit stages, the overall cpu consumption (significantly) and will also provide zero latency processing. Though, there is currently no deadline for the beta and therefore no valid release schedule yet.

Somewhere later,  we will have a brand new Channelstrip sort of thing to see the light here. There is not that much I can disclose on this one at the moment but just a slight glimpse:  This upcoming device will really shine on combining some rather contrary but complementary technical designs ranging from vintage style boost/cut filtering up to digital brickwall limiting and all this in a zero latency fashion to have it available as the ideal go-to option for the mixing channel and even suitable for tracking purposes (though I currently like it on the 2bus so much more). Stay tuned …