which are your favorite VST audio editor pluings?
Reply #1 – 2013-01-19 11:25:36
I don't do masses of VST plugin-based editing, and I've only used fb2k and Audacity to accomplish it. Most of my editing is for live music backing with full dynamic range. I can give the thumbs up to ToneBoosters' Compressor. My main recollection is in a fb2k batch job to level out some quiet and varied background music before encoding to MP3 while retaining much of the transient kick, using the plugin in fb2k Converter. In total I've processed over 30 hours of music that way (probably 40 including Christmas tracks) and listened to it all many times over, usually as quiet background, occasionally very loud. Originally, I used RG Album Gain -> foo_dsp_vlevel -> Advanced Limiter save as FLAC, rescan RG and Apply Track Gain to 84.5 dB target (-4.5 dB preamp) in the Converter (MP3 either LAME or Helix VBR around 130kbps average as my player isn't gapless). I found that vlevel would sometimes get perceptually quite different loudness so I used ReplayGain after the vlevel to compensate afterwards - e.g. Robbie William's Millennium came out much louder than most tracks, probably 5 or 6 dB from vlevel - and vlevel occasionally dipped quite noticeably in an intro preceding a sharp increase in volume, e.g. during the solo guitar intro to Since You Been Gone by Rainbow depending partly on the look-ahead setting. I haven't done quite so many tracks with it, but I found the ToneBoosters' TB Compressor in their demo toolkit did a good job and gave a decent visual impression of where the compression kicked in and cut out as I played music through it. I tried it and set it up with some material with a wide range of loudness. What springs to mind is Aretha Franklin's cover of Tracks Of My Tears which is beautiful and could have been written for her; it starts very quietly with just a guitar & soft voice and ends up at in full voice and band and would otherwise be lost for the first verse or two when played as background music, so this was a good test for my settings, which differed from the default. As for loudness variations based on a ReplayGain scan of the output at the FLAC stage, there were fewer statistical outliers than with vlevel - e.g. Millennium fell into line. Both TB Compressor and foo_dsp_vlevel work nicely on the whole, but I'm tempted to use TB Compressor first in future. Intermixing the two (after Track Gain to 84.5 dB SPL) didn't leave a noticeable difference in acoustic signature and I've not yet noticed any pumping artifacts in the way I've used TB Compressor (albeit on noise-free material with nothing noiselike like brushed snares) I threw together some nice sounding 15-hour compilations of alternating Christmas Track (TB Compressor) then Regular Track (foo_dsp_vlevel mostly) with a variety of eras & styles represented, especially in the Christmas material, and it all came out nice-sounding and consistent) When I got TB Compressor I was thinking I might want to use TB Barricade (a sort of radio pre-processor with supposedly some sort of psychoacoustic awareness of loudness perception) but found just what I needed in the Compressor. I have to give thanks to Peter for fb2k and David for ReplayGain which made the task immeasurably easier than I'd have imagined without them and various others who contributed plugins and tuned LAME and Helix MP3 etc. (I have also used TB Compressor in fb2k to make music just plain louder on limited equipment in the past, but now I usually just switch on Windows 7's Playback Device/Properties/Enhancements/Loudness Equalization if I need that, especially for very quiet Youtube videos playing over laptop speakers, which fb2k's plugins cannot modify). It's just a shame that dynamic compression is so hard to get to when I need it in Windows. I'd love to be able to enable it quickly from the Windows volume control or Mixer at times, rather like the >100% up to 200% volume control in VLC Media Player, which is also usefully amber/red colour-coded to indicate the potential for distortion. I'd also be glad to have to enable it with a tick box next to the master volume and/or any of the application volume sliders, and like the switch from optical zoom to digital zoom on a camera, have the volume reach the linear limit first, then proceed into the compressed region with a second press of the volume button or slide of the finger/mouse. In fact, for Youtube, I wouldn't mind being able to volume-level it at lower volume too.