Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: DSP Stacker Stability

« on: February 25, 2018, 05:18:49 AM »

I'm now using the free features of the Stereo Tool DSP plug-in (https://www.stereotool.com/download/), which is also very expensive.

I actually have not seen that one until now.  Very cool!  I will have to get my grubby little hands on that sometime.  I have some ozone plugins and they are very good, but the UI and the pretty graphics alone can crash a media player, and even most DAW's choke when they're loaded.

Out of curiosity, how do you use any/all enhancements?  EQ?  Reverb?  Saturation?  Etc.  I am always on the hunt for new techniques, settings, etc.

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General Discussion / Re: DSP Stacker Stability

« on: February 20, 2018, 10:34:20 PM »

Ah ok, that makes more sense Out of interest, what vst, etc do you tend to use? As part of me wants to consider doing a vst loader (or updating one of the existing ones) but it's not an area I'm that knowledgeable on at the moment.

-dro

(One thing I would like to say, if people are reading this that do not know exactly what this is about and are still reading...   vst/plugin is, in a nut shell, a turbo charged equalizer that can also be dynamic and adjust to the music being played)

For "sweetening" or adding that certain je ne sais quoi to an album, genre, or almost anything, it is certainly best to keep it simple.  Generally I use or look for one dynamic equalizer (not to be confused with dynamic compressors), or an exciter, tape saturation, maybe an imager, and finish with a nice general limiter/maximizer.  I generally stay away from compressors for a lot of reasons, but mainly because almost everything is already compressed to a certain degree and there is nothing worse than flattening the dynamic range of a good tune.  From a pure music standpoint, that is about it.

I have no clue how many plugins are out there, but more than what is healthy for sure.  I would like to think it would not be unreasonable to be able to support one or two vst's, but I probably know far more about what will crash things rather than what will make an integration more efficient. 

Looking at this from a developers point of view is a bit more fun.

If this is anything you would like to even entertain I will be more than happy to share everything regarding this. 

Oddly enough, a few months back I was perusing some vintage winamp goodness when I came across an Izotope plugin for winamp (not sure if it was native or not) but Izotope is certainly still around and is certainly not free.  Also would almost certainly crash any media player it was stuffed into, but aside from that, awesome!  And in 2001?  I know I was using winamp at that time but I do not remember seeing anything like that. 

So yeah, something like this... 

https://winampheritage.com/plugin/izotope-ozone/79374

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General Discussion / Re: DSP Stacker Stability

« on: February 09, 2018, 02:58:18 PM »

One thing I do have to ask is what sorts of vst are being used & why so many are actually needed in usage? I have to ask as up to 10 seems a bit extreme as I generally try to minimise any re-processing of the audio due to it often causing more issues (especially audio degradation depending on what's being done but maybe it's just me ).

-dro

Lol, good point.  Mostly to test the stability limits and what kind of plugins will crash whatever playback I am using.  A few times I have stacked that many plugins in order to 'enhance' some terrible recordings, but only to convert the files with the dsp settings (occasionally it is useful to convert through the media player as opposed to a daw because of stability issues or bulk processing) , I have never used a large stack for playback.  One plugin, maybe two if playback is awful.

For me I find it nice to at least have the option.  Of course there is no way to recover data that has been lost with mp3 and various others, but for quite a bit of songs in my collection, a subtle plugin can make a huge difference.

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General Discussion / Re: DSP Stacker Stability

« on: January 13, 2018, 07:34:46 AM »

I liked to use multiple DSP plug-ins but I can't ever seem to find a stacker that doesn't tend to crash and take Winamp down with it. Is this due to the plug-ins themselves (they seem to be very stable on their own)?

Is there a more robust stacker? It would also be helpful if the individual plug-ins crashed themselves but didn't affect the whole application.

A little dated, but I joined the community so... I can tell you what I run that works for me and what has failed, so hopefully something useful comes out of this.  For years I have used my computer for everything audio and have constantly tried to improve, well, everything.  What I am currently running and why... 

Actual playback is Winamp, but I also run J. River Media Center (x64 v23) because hands down it has the best audio processing, and it is very reasonably stable as a native vst/dsp plugin host.  If you don't know anything about J.River, it is a stand alone media player and very good, but it's best heard and not seen if you know what I mean.  J.River comes standard with a WDM driver which allows you to be able to choose it as a sound output device (basically a sound card),  With this setup you get everything wiinamp and the best audio out along with stable vst/dsp abilities.

I have used about every vst wrapper out there (bluecat,  ddmf, bias, jbridge, etc.) and crammed them into about every sound configuration you can do and I have always had problems and/or they are a mess to setup and configure to work local.  Other than J.River, I am not aware that there is a media player that natively supports vst plugins for dsp, and considering that is the crux of the problem...  There is a vst host plugin for Foobar but that goes back to the original problem.

Without getting into detail about vst's and hosts, the biggest problem is the resources required.  Vst's, are for the most part, pigs.  They are also designed to work in DAW's and not media players.  Media players don't allocate the resources that DAW's do so even if you can get one, maybe two, crammed into your media player through a wrapper/host that is stable, the media player has to contend with not only doing with it is supposed to be doing, but to have it try and swallow the metric ton of information that the vst's are sending to it breaks it very quickly.  Also, the host is probably not very happy at this point also because they are generally not designed to be fed from a lowly media player buffer.  If any one of them fails the entire thing fails.  That is pretty much the reason you don't see media players supporting it.  Also, as if audio processing wasn't intensive enough, a lot of vst's have fancy lights and meters bouncing all over so the vst gui alone can easily break a host just because it looks fancy.  About every host/wrapper touts stacking a bunch of plugins in it regardless of the application, but that is not reasonable in most scenarios. 

The major caveat with any setup like this though is if you have a x86 host you will be limited to x86 plugins.  Unfortunately that is the nature of the beast.  And not all vst plugins play nice with proper hosts (e.g. Waves Audio plugins), but a lot do.  I certainly encourage looking into vst/dsp processing because it can make a huge difference in sound quality, particularly if you're playing back from any kind of lossy format such as mp3.  There are a lot of free vst plugins that are really good and make this very worth it.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know and I would be happy to answer them.  I have spent more time than I will admit to getting solid dsp functionality through media player playback and if I can save anyone time, broken keyboards, and frustration I will feel better. 

I currently can run (and sometime do) up to about 10 vst dsp plugins simultaneously and using yet another program, although indirectly, I can use any plugin regardless of x86 or x64 architecture and not only stable but no buffer issues, static, or delays.  So I guess, yes it is very possible to get the dsp you want and hopefully without the headache of doing it. 

I am around if you have any questions...