bkFX v0.8.0 - Free Effects Suite - NEW down-/upward compressor

[karrikuh]

Yes, these are some seriously good stuff.. Thank you!

I report that all of the plugins work well here, with 32bit Vista on AMD Athlon, latest EnergyXT and Studio One Prof.

Studio One has a feature on the mixer, 'expand', which expands the plugin options right there on the mixer. That doesn't work with these plugins, yet I tried with Gruhn's and MDA plugs as well -- they don't work either, so I suppose it's something with how S1 handles plugins without interfaces and not a flaw in the plugs themselves..

The pitch plugin has become my #1 choice for pitch shifting, I really like it. The delay and modfilter are fabulous as well. Really some great stuff.. And now listening and testing, the ensemble seems to hit a sweet spot here..

Thanks!

Regarding the passthrough plug.. I'm not a Reaper user and I wonder what is it good for in that host, how is it used there? I can't think of much use for it with the hosts I use.

Yes, it's really of limited use, probably moreso outside Reaper. For those curious, in Reaper I use it to mix several channels within a track. E.g. if you use bkFreqSplitter in a track, it has 3 stereo channels. After processing each channel separately, you usually want to mix down these 3 channels to a single stereo channel. The most CPU efficient way to achieve this is to insert bkPassthrough at the end of the FX chain and route all three channels to the input of bkPassthrough. This will then output the mix of the 3 channels.

[ras.s]

Ah, thanks for the explanation, makes sense.

[DuX]

Actually, now that you explained it a bit better, Karrikuh, I think I'm going to use the bkPassThrough a lot! I'm always bothered with Reaper sending just 2 stereo outs to the master out, even though the output of the track is 8 or more channels. I'm sure they will resolve that given time, but for now your plugin is a great thing to have and fixes the weird behaviour.

And I was wondering what would I use it for... Thank you!

[Debutante]

...might you please consider separating the filter as a VST on its own?

See here (it's called "bkModFilter"):
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=369138
including additional filter types!

fantastic! Great low pass on that filter. Thats frigkin filterin' right there. Even in the Charlatan synth its like it was able to isolate the fundamental. very nice. I tried the synth on a whim and heard that cut the first time I dialed it in

what exactly did you do - I think its very very steep natively

might want to check HP2 though... turning up the q factor starts to heavily bleed lower freq's that were cut off.

Also AP4 filter isn't working proper values at 96khz - all the others are at the appropriate freq - values are like it wasn't optimized for 96khz

FL Studio
Phenom II 940
WinXP SP3

[DuX]

Oh gosh, I just had bkEnsemble crash Reaper. It's weird. I tried to recreate what happened and it didn't crash again. Possibly I haven't recreated it perfectly. I was playing with TAL Elec7ro II, with some automation of "VCF Keyboard Follow", and then inserted bkEnsemble, and got the dreaded error message. Restarted it, tried again, and everything went fine. These are tough bugs to squash when you can't recreate it to happen again. I'm on WinXP SP3, RME ASIO, 96kHz, AMD Phenomenal.

I know it's not really helpful, but... there you go.

Cheers!

[brok landers]

bkensemble:
yes, the bkensemble is a bit buggy here, too, though it doesn't crash. but sometimes, when loading up a song with it saved, it just "bypasses", meaning the signal goes through the plugin unaltered. same happens if it is just manually inserted. but that seems to be random, i can't reproduce it always, as well as i can't fix it, i always have to try around, then suddenly it works again. even preset saving doesn't cure this problem.


bkdelay:
on the delay i miss a pingpong input mode, where the dry signal, which goes to the mixer is stereo, but the signal going to the delay engine itself is stereo > mono.
the way that is now, it only allows for either side input or full stereo input.
with either side input, which up to now is the only way to actually get a ping pong delay, as soon as you automate the panning before the delay, the signal doesn't feed the delay on one side, which leads to the fact that there is no delay then.
with the stereo mode, if you have a signal that is panned centered, you don't have the delay alternating one by one, but it simply swaps the sides when fed back.
the only mode that would give the user the typical traditional ping pong delay correctly, is missing. which is a shame, as otherwise the could be a general goto delay.

and another delay mode would be really cool, actually easy to do:
a cross delay. meaning one side input, other side delay... tha way one can do great jarre delays, with the synth itself being panned to one, and the delay outputs the delay only to the other side. basically just like the stereo mode in pingpong, only without the taps altering the side one after another...

lastly i would love to see the stereo enhancer knob being bipolar, to the right it does what it does now, and to the left it narrows the stereo spectrum, until, when the knob is completely left, the signal is mono. that way one can adjust the width of the delays signal to fit into the respective mix - not always i would want to have full stereo...

and another thing of the delay:
in studio one one can't "reset" the plugin to default values, but that may be the fault of studio one. there's other plugins that behave the same.
but more crucial is, that i cannot seem to get the offset factors to perfect 1, 2, 3, etc... as soon as i moved the knob to whatever value and release it, i can't go to perfect factor values, as tzhe knob just won't let me get to the value, as well as that the plugin doesn't accept numbers that i directly type into the value field. this actually is the case with all bk plugins in s1.


otherwise i must say these are really nice freebys, thank you for makisng them free!


btw, win xp pro sp3, 32bit, rme digi9652, studio one pro.

[DuX]

All good points, Brok!

Yeah, I would also say that bkEnsemble seems to crash randomly.

[karrikuh]

Oh gosh, I just had bkEnsemble crash Reaper. It's weird. I tried to recreate what happened and it didn't crash again. Possibly I haven't recreated it perfectly. I was playing with TAL Elec7ro II, with some automation of "VCF Keyboard Follow", and then inserted bkEnsemble, and got the dreaded error message. Restarted it, tried again, and everything went fine. These are tough bugs to squash when you can't recreate it to happen again. I'm on WinXP SP3, RME ASIO, 96kHz, AMD Phenomenal.

I know it's not really helpful, but... there you go.

Cheers!

Sorry to hear about crashes, will investigate, although, as you say, not being able to reproduce bugs reliably complicates things considerably. It is however good to know that the crashes occur only with bkEnsemble, not with the rest of the bunch (correct me if I'm wrong).

[karrikuh]

fantastic! Great low pass on that filter. Thats frigkin filterin' right there. Even in the Charlatan synth its like it was able to isolate the fundamental. very nice. I tried the synth on a whim and heard that cut the first time I dialed it in

what exactly did you do - I think its very very steep natively

might want to check HP2 though... turning up the q factor starts to heavily bleed lower freq's that were cut off.

Hm, I did another frequency response analysis of the filter code yesterday and it looks fine. I guess it's just how the relatively low roll-off of a 2-pole compared to 4-pole is perceived. Did you compare to other 2-pole filter plugins?

Also AP4 filter isn't working proper values at 96khz - all the others are at the appropriate freq - values are like it wasn't optimized for 96khz

FL Studio
Phenom II 940
WinXP SP3

Listening carefully with resonance turned up, AP4 @ at 96kHz behaves much like 44.1KHz for me, so all seems normal. How did you conclude that something could be wrong here?

@broklanders: thanks for your ideas, I will think about them.

[brok landers]

>snip<
@broklanders: thanks for your ideas, I will think about them.

great, take your time...

[A.M. Gold]

I hate to be the screaming baby in the thread but is anyone eyeing these to put even basic GUI skins on them?

They are all good enough to deserve it, IMO.

Sorry if this has been covered, I haven't had time to read the whole thread.

[brok landers]

hi karrikuh,
any news on the fx bundle? bumpedibump...

[karrikuh]

hi karrikuh,
any news on the fx bundle? bumpedibump...

Not much tbh, I did some framework overhaul towards cross-platform portability (long-term goal). I might add some small improvements here and there, proper GUIs however will not happen in the next couple of months I'm afraid.

bkdelay:
on the delay i miss a pingpong input mode, where the dry signal, which goes to the mixer is stereo, but the signal going to the delay engine itself is stereo > mono.
the way that is now, it only allows for either side input or full stereo input.
with either side input, which up to now is the only way to actually get a ping pong delay, as soon as you automate the panning before the delay, the signal doesn't feed the delay on one side, which leads to the fact that there is no delay then.
with the stereo mode, if you have a signal that is panned centered, you don't have the delay alternating one by one, but it simply swaps the sides when fed back.
the only mode that would give the user the typical traditional ping pong delay correctly, is missing. which is a shame, as otherwise the could be a general goto delay.

Hmm, while I don't see this as something essential (does panning the delay *input* really give you particularly interesting results?) I might add two modes "Mono L"/"Mono R" to the Ping Pong parameter. Not completely convinced yet, however.

and another delay mode would be really cool, actually easy to do:
a cross delay. meaning one side input, other side delay... tha way one can do great jarre delays, with the synth itself being panned to one, and the delay outputs the delay only to the other side. basically just like the stereo mode in pingpong, only without the taps altering the side one after another...

Since you can achieve non-standard effects like this using your DAWs signal routing capabilities, I'd rather avoid introducing yet another parameter just for this special purpose. Or maybe I could rename the "ping pong" parameter to "routing" and combine it with the "Jarre mode"?

lastly i would love to see the stereo enhancer knob being bipolar, to the right it does what it does now, and to the left it narrows the stereo spectrum, until, when the knob is completely left, the signal is mono. that way one can adjust the width of the delays signal to fit into the respective mix - not always i would want to have full stereo...

This, I agree, would a very useful addition.

and another thing of the delay:
in studio one one can't "reset" the plugin to default values, but that may be the fault of studio one. there's other plugins that behave the same.
but more crucial is, that i cannot seem to get the offset factors to perfect 1, 2, 3, etc... as soon as i moved the knob to whatever value and release it, i can't go to perfect factor values, as tzhe knob just won't let me get to the value, as well as that the plugin doesn't accept numbers that i directly type into the value field. this actually is the case with all bk plugins in s1.

Yes, with your hosts default GUI, targeting accurate values is difficult, a GUI version of course will allow to snap to integer factors, maybe keyboard value input.

[brok landers]

>snip<

bkdelay:
on the delay i miss a pingpong input mode, where the dry signal, which goes to the mixer is stereo, but the signal going to the delay engine itself is stereo > mono.
the way that is now, it only allows for either side input or full stereo input.
with either side input, which up to now is the only way to actually get a ping pong delay, as soon as you automate the panning before the delay, the signal doesn't feed the delay on one side, which leads to the fact that there is no delay then.
with the stereo mode, if you have a signal that is panned centered, you don't have the delay alternating one by one, but it simply swaps the sides when fed back.
the only mode that would give the user the typical traditional ping pong delay correctly, is missing. which is a shame, as otherwise the could be a general goto delay.

Hmm, while I don't see this as something essential (does panning the delay *input* really give you particularly interesting results?) I might add two modes "Mono L"/"Mono R" to the Ping Pong parameter. Not completely convinced yet, however.

no, you missundertood me. i don't mean the signal going into the delay network doing alternate-panning. what i mean is, that the only way to achieve a pingpong delay in your plugin, is using one of the side inputs from the gui (ping pong knob, left or right, l+r does produce a center tap naturally, so thatone's out). while this works with centered mono signals feeding the plugin, it naturally doesn't work, if the signal is panned before your plugin (be it via automation, autopanner, or a synth lfo which is routed to panning in the synth internally). f.e. i choose inpult left on your plugin, but the signal before the plugin is hardpanned to the right, your plugin doesn't produce any output, as it only uses signal coming from the left.
so what i meant was, that there should be 2 additional modes, which essentially summ up the signal which is exclusively going to the delay network, to mono. that way both sides of the inputsignal, left and right are respected, as the delay network recieves the stereo information summed up to mono. the signal into the delay network, right after the summing, then must be hard panned internally to either side (selectable with the pingpong knob on the gui), effectively overcoming the above mentioned problem. the signal _before_ the plugin then can be panned as one desired, without the delay being negatively affected in the way that it would miss the information from one side... that is how all professional pingpong delays are done (i.e. eventide, boss, roland, korg, etc). i hope i made clear what i mean now.

and another delay mode would be really cool, actually easy to do:
a cross delay. meaning one side input, other side delay... tha way one can do great jarre delays, with the synth itself being panned to one, and the delay outputs the delay only to the other side. basically just like the stereo mode in pingpong, only without the taps altering the side one after another...

Since you can achieve non-standard effects like this using your DAWs signal routing capabilities, I'd rather avoid introducing yet another parameter just for this special purpose. Or maybe I could rename the "ping pong" parameter to "routing" and combine it with the "Jarre mode"?

there's no way to do such a delay in any host, it's the delay that has to do this. essentially it works like this:
the delay is a conventional stereo delay. the signal that goes to the delay network is stereo, but left/right is swapped just before the delay network. so, if you got the signal before the delay centered, the delay will spit out a stereo delay, only the sides are swapped, the delay tap left spits out the right input signal and vice versa, no crossrouting of the taps. now, if one, with that delayscheme, pans the signal before the plugin to the right, only the left taps carrying the right input are being spit out by the plugin. if the signal before the plugin is panned left, only the right taps carrying the left input are being spit out by the plugin. hence, if i use the plugin as a send effect, the delay outputs the signal being panned to the right before the plugin, to the left, and outputs the singal being panned to the left before the plugin, to the right. get what i mean?
another, easier alternative to do the typical jarre delay would of course be, to add a panning knob, which pans the delay networks output right before the out mixer, which mixes the dry and the wet signal together. that way one can pan the delay signal to the side desired, and the signal before the plugin to the other side...

and another thing on the delay:
in studio one one can't "reset" the plugin to default values, but that may be the fault of studio one. there's other plugins that behave the same.
but more crucial is, that i cannot seem to get the offset factors to perfect 1, 2, 3, etc... as soon as i moved the knob to whatever value and release it, i can't go to perfect factor values, as tzhe knob just won't let me get to the value, as well as that the plugin doesn't accept numbers that i directly type into the value field. this actually is the case with all bk plugins in s1.

Yes, with your hosts default GUI, targeting accurate values is difficult, a GUI version of course will allow to snap to integer factors, maybe keyboard value input.

i don't know, in logic i never had the problem and there's as well some guiless 3rd party plugins in studio one where this works. on those i can finetune with shift held or using the mousewheel, or i can type in the desired value. i assume it's rather the parameter stepsize you allow internally, as well as defining a default value, when ctrl-clicking the knob, as this action just sends a "set default" value, which is what you have to adress in the code for the respective parameter. at least that's how it _should_ work.
however, it's really crucial to be able to get the exact values in whatever way (even with the host internal gui), as, like i stated above, if i can't set the perfect delay factors, i can't really use the delay, at least not in host sync mode.

btw, a word on the ensemble fx - this is by far the most accurate bbd ensemble of a solina i've ever heard, which even sounds great in stereo mode. it would be nice though, if it wouldn't be a hit and miss for the plugin to work at all. sometimes it works, another time when instanciating, it doesn't... this happens regulary, but randomly and i sadly am not able to reproduce it on demand... would be nice if at least this bug could be fixed, as i adore especially this plugin of yours...

again, thanks for your effort doing such great plugins, and for free... if i'd be you, i'd charge for them, at least making them pay-what-you-want donationware, with a certain minimum amount of money mandatory... so that you get compensated at least a bit, for your hard work... just saying...

[gamecat666]

I hate to be the screaming baby in the thread but is anyone eyeing these to put even basic GUI skins on them?

yep, i'd like to

but it sounds like the author is going to do it as the last stage in development. And charlatan looks fine so nothing to worry about in that regard.

still, i fancy doing some mockups..