Old thread but since I'm reviewing Nebula for http://www.soundbytesmag.net I wanted to clear up a couple things.bduffy wrote:So, after having a long play with Nebula, even grabbed a couple of commercial libraries, and I have to say: I am not sold. I heard a couple of good things (some exciters and tapes mostly), but once again, I find the compressors to be unusable, and I just tried a reverb that used 60% of my CPU in Cubase, and would not play back without sputtering (the bounced-down file sounded nice - but how am I supposed to mix with that??).
1) You should be using the Nebula Reverb plug-in for pretty much all types of libraries since the developers generally say they sound better.
2) To get proper reverb performance in Nebula you have to change to change a couple settings.
- Load up an empty Nebula instance.
- Go to the MAST page,
- Switch to GURU MODE.
- You'll see an LFREQD parameter. This is the maximum length your reverb tail can be chances are it's wrong (the free EMT program from VNXT is 2.5 seconds for instance). We'll get to that shortly.
- In the lower right hand corner, check your DSPBUFFER value.
- Hit the SAVE.
The DSPBUFFER is the single most important setting in regards to CPU performance but it also affects latency (which shouldn't be much of an issue when mixing in a host with PDC). Most systems have a sweet spot and going higher than that does not improve performance - so try increasing it one increment at a time. On my system reverb's require 1024 to 8192 DPSBUFFER settings depending on the samplerate and complexity. I've gotten in the habit of leaving it at 8192.
Now back to that LFREQD value. For some reason, Nebula doesn't let you internally tweak that to be high enough, so you'll have to do this manually.
- Locate the folder containing your Nebula Reverb plug-in.
- Open the XML file with the same name is your Nebula Reverb plug-in.
- Find the "<LFRED> </LFREQD>" section and replace it with "<LFREQD> 6000000 </LFREQD>
- Save the XML file.
Now you can support the full length of the reverbs available for Nebula so far. If you open up Nebula now, you should be able to see the correct LFREQD value on the MAST page in GURU MODE - just don't try to modify it in Nebula.
It's definitely more complicated than it needs to be. On the other hand, I'm a big time reverb snob but the programs based on real plates are far more accurate for plates than any convolution plug-in (or algorithmic box) that I've used.
Try it with those settings and see if you're experiences improve. And make sure to try commercial reverb libraries based on acoustic (rather than digital) sources from VNXT, CupWise and Tim Petherick before writing it off - they blow everything in the basic library away. SiganlToNoize also has a UniVibe Spring that I haven't tried yet.
3) Not sure which compressors you tried, but if you didn't try BusComp609 A from CupWise or the 76D from AlexB, you should give those a shot. Make sure to read the manual carefully before using them to get good results.
Nebula's not for everyone and the metering in compressors is fiddly (and the early ones just weren't any good at all) but the sound on the best recent libraries is some of the very best you can get without using outboard gear (and I spend a lot of time comparing those nuances professionally).
