SlickEQ – some more release info

Just a couple of days ago we introduced the upcoming release of SlickEQ and lots of questions raised already. So, here is what Fabien already committed about it in a public forum:

• Win/Mac, AU/VST2/VST3 (+AAX planned and in process), x32/x64
• No linux builds planned, sorry.
• The name is “TDR VOS Slick EQ” and it will be available for free.
• Release is a matter of days. Maybe a week or two.

As of today I just want to add: With the introduction of TDR VOS SlickEQ, quite a number of amazing and previously unheard DSP algorithms will see the light of day – including (but not limited to) several Stateful Saturation algorithms running within an audio signal path entirely upsampled to a constant high sample rate for maximum precision.

Expect smoothness, best-in-class.

Related links:

• thread at kvraudio.com
• what I’m currently working on – Vol. 12
• vladg/sound
• sharing the same vision …

interview series (8) – Sascha Eversmeier

Sascha, are you a musician yourself or do you have some other sort of musical background? And how did you once got started developing your very own audio DSP effects?

I started learning to play bass guitar in early 1988, when I was 16. Bass is still my main instrument, although I also play a tiny bit of 6-string, but I’d say I suck at that.

The people I played with in a band in my youth where mostly close friends I grew up with, and most of us kept on making music together when we finished school a couple of years later. I still consider that period (mid-nineties) as sort of my personal heyday, musical-wise. It’s when you think you’re doing brilliant things but the world doesn’t take notice. Anyway. Although we all started out doing Metal, we eventually did Alternative and a bit of Brit-influenced Wave Rock back then.

That was also the time when more and more affordable electronic gear came up, so apart from doing the usual rock-band lineup, we also experimented with samplers, DATs, click tracks and PCs as recording devices. While that in fact made the ‘band’ context more complex – imagine loading in a dozen disks into the E-MU on every start of the rehearsal until we equipped it with an MO drive – we soon found ourselves moving away from writing songs through jamming and more to actually “assembling” them by using a mouse pointer. In hindsight, that was really challenging. Today, the DAW world and the whole process of creating music is so much simpler and intuitive, I think.

My first “DAW” was a PC running at 233Mhz, and we used PowerTracks Pro and Micro Logic – a stripped-down version of Logic -, although the latter never clicked with me. In 1996 or 97 – can’t remember – I purchased Cubase and must have ordered right within a grace period, as I soon got a letter from Steinberg saying they now finished the long-awaited VST version and I could have it for free, if I want. WTF? I had no idea what they were talking about. But Virtual Studio Technology, that sounded like I was given the opportunity to upgrade myself to being “professional”. How flattering, you clever marketing guys. Yes, gimme the damn thing, hehe.

When VST arrived, I was blown away. I had a TSR-8 reel machine, a DA-88 and a large Allen&Heath desk within reach and was used to run the computer as a midi sequencer mainly. And now, I could do it all inside that thing. Unbelievable. Well, the biggest challenge then was finding an affordable audio card, and I bought myself one that only had S/PDif in & outputs and was developed by a German electronics magazine and sold in small amounts through a big retail store in Cologne, exclusively. 500 Deutschmarks for 16 bits on an ISA card. Wow.

The first plugin I bought was Waves Audio Track, sort of a channel strip, which was a cross-promotion offer from Steinberg back then, 1997, I guess. I can still recall its serial number by heart.

Soon, the plugin scene lifted off, and I collected everything I could, like the early mda stuff, NorthPole and other classics. As our regular band came to nothing, we gathered our stuff and ran sort of a small project studio where we recorded other bands and musicians and started using the PC as the main recording device. I upgraded the audio hardware to an Echo Darla card, but one of my mates soon brought in a Layla rack unit so that we had plenty of physical ins and outs.

You really couldn’t foresee where the audio industry would go, at least I couldn’t. I went fine with this “hybrid” setup for quite a long time, and did lots of recording and editing back then, but wasn’t even thinking of programming audio software myself at all. I had done a few semesters of EE studies, but without really committing myself much.

Then the internet came along. In 1998, I made a cut and started taking classes in Informatics. Finished in 2000, I moved far away, from West Germany, to Berlin and had my first “real” job in one of those “new economy” companies, doing web-based programming and SQL. That filled the fridge and was fun to do somehow, but wasn’t really challenging. As my classes included C, C++ and also Assembler, and I still got a copy of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, I signed up to the VST SDK one day. At first, I might have done pretty much the same thing as everybody: compile the “gain” and “delay” plugin examples and learn how it all fits together. VST was still at version 1 at that time, so there were no instruments yet, but I wasn’t interested much in those anyway, or at least I could imagine writing myself a synthesizer. What I was more interested in was how to manipulate the audio so that it could sound like a compressor or a tube device. I was really keen on dynamics processing at that time, perhaps because I always had too few of those units. I had plenty available when I was working part-time as a live-sound engineer, but back in my home studio, a cheap Alesis, dbx or Behringer was all I could afford. So why not try to program one? I basically knew how to read schematics, I knew how to solder, and I thought I knew how things should sound like, so I just started out hacking things together. Probably in the most ignorant and naive way, from today’s perspective. I had no real clue, and no serious tool set, apart from an old student’s copy of Maple and my beloved Corel 7. But there were helpful people on the internet and a growing community of people devoted to audio software, and that was perhaps the most important factor. You just weren’t alone.

interview series (7) – Dave Gamble

Dave, can you tell us a little about how you got into music, and your professional career as an audio effects developer so far?

Started writing trackers as a child, then wrote some code to allow me to DJ with trackers. By 14 I was writing commercial software. Had some great teachers and lecturers who helped me a lot. Did my final-year project with Focusrite. Won the project prize. Spent 4.5 years at Focusrite (I was employee 12 or 13) to add DSP to the company, during which time we acquired Novation, and grew quite a lot. We made a lot of money from audio interfaces, so that kinda took over, and I wanted to get back to the DSP (at Focusrite I did Forte suite, helped with Liquid Channel/Mix, Saffire suite, plus other non DSP projects). Left for Sonalksis, built all their shipping products (except CQ1 and DQ1), although I’d built tbk1 years before and they’d been selling it. Was fun but chaotic. Left to go freelance so I could start my own outfit, during which time I worked with Neyrinck, TAC System, Focusrite, Novation, Studio Devil, FXpansion, Brainworx/Plugin Alliance, etc. Then started dmgaudio. And here we are now.

NastyDLA – final teaser and release info

NastyVCS – I can has dynamics

The upcoming NastyVCS virtual console strip VST plug-in will feature three pristine and complementary tools to shape the audio dynamics. This allows a vast variety of different dynamic treatments and here is a very first and brief overview:

compressor gain control principles

A short compendium on digital audio compression techniques.

Basic compressor configurations

Compression vs. limiting

Technically speaking the same principles are used in audio signal limiting and compression processors but just the transfer curves and envelope follower settings are different. Ultra fast attack rates and high ratio amounts are used for limiting purposes which causes just very few peaks to pass on a certain threshold.

In digital implementations limiting processors can be more strict due to look-ahead and clever gain prediction functions which guarantees that no peak information passes the threshold. That is called brickwall limiting then.