Which plugins add unwanted watermarks to audio?

[xNiMiNx]

hmm, didn't hear the difference.

Maybe his (Davias) laptop (combination of hardware / speakers) puts him into the 'may hear something' minority?

Thats why i raised the question earlier, i wonder how many people say they dont like some sample lib, or vst, thinking its just poor quality, when in reality, theyre just on an unlucky combination of hardware / speakers combined with a watermark.

[Davias]

hmm, didn't hear the difference.

Maybe his (Davias) laptop (combination of hardware / speakers) puts him into the 'may hear something' minority?

Thats why i raised the question earlier, i wonder how many people say they dont like some sample lib, or vst, thinking its just poor quality, when in reality, theyre just on an unlucky combination of hardware / speakers combined with a watermark.

Yes I find my laptop speakers (actually they aren't really my laptop's speakers but the speakers my laptop is plugged on, cheap 10$ creative labs, very smalls) very revealing for some things that I don't hear on my monitoring system (maybe due to my poor untreated room, I don't know), I always double check every mix on these speakers ^^

On second listen I had more hard to hear differences, but I still felt some plasticity in the processed examples.

I will check into my headphones on my main computer, usually this is the configuration where I can hear most things (but not everything ! )

[Davias]

After listening on my headphone for a while, I almost came at the conclusion that the example were sounding the same. That it was subliminal and that I should have done a blind listening because my brain was telling me things. And then I gave it a last try and I found an obvious difference in the sweetness of the attack of a flute in example "bach-in.wav" and "bach-out.wav" around 28 seconds. In bach-out the blowing noise is clearly more harsh and un-natural to my ears. Of course in non-classical music examples I guess it is almost impossible to tell the difference because the mixes are busy and noisy (in the sense of "there is a lot of freqs") (I didn't even bothered to listen them on the laptop before).

So if my hearing tells me the truth and if there is really a small difference, I'm also interested to know if this can build up in a mix if most of the sources and the processes apply different kinds of watermarks at every stage of the audio chain

Maybe this will lead into the sound of 2020, where added to the many distortions, exciting and hard slamming into multiband dynamics processors and others crazy stuff (that we already hear today in some productions , you will have the build up of watermarking too ! Ultra sizzling weird inharmonics to color your sound in a more futuristic way Maybe only using watermarked synths could lead to have a "signature sound", that people could maybe love with appropriate marketing (or great tunes)

[SODDI]

A simple test.

In Wavelab or similar audio editor, add a watermark (artists name etc.) to an audio file (hereafter known as the sample).
Open yr DAW, open your sample player of choice, load the sample.
Play the sample player with a MIDI track, then render that MIDI track to audio.
Open the rendered audio track that uses the sample in the audio editor and see if the metadata watermark appears in that audio track.

[chk071]

Thats why i raised the question earlier, i wonder how many people say they dont like some sample lib, or vst, thinking its just poor quality, when in reality, theyre just on an unlucky combination of hardware / speakers combined with a watermark.

Hm, i guess what's next is that people post that they always knew there's something weird about the metallic and dry sound of Tone2's synth, and now are convinced it has to do with the watermarking... come on, let's have some facts first before we lead ourselves completely in the filed of speculation. I doubt that the watermarking is audible, as i've written before, i think it would be pretty counterproductive when you program a synth, screw at its sound until you think it fits right, then implement some obscure copy protection which wrecks the sound again. Get my point?

We won't find out anyway, highly unlikely that Tone2 come here and talk freely about how watermarking is implemented.

Oh, and checking over laptop speakers as a proof is highly doubtable too...

[xNiMiNx]

i think it would be pretty counterproductive when you program a synth, screw at its sound until you think it fits right, then implement some obscure copy protection which wrecks the sound again. Get my point?

No i dont get your point. What youre describing, is different than what i was discussing. We were talking about on the fly watermarking, meaning, the watermark would be there from the start, not let you tweak stuff, and when youre done tweaking stuff, magically inject. These watermarks are inaudible, or so says the dev. Why would it wreck the sound?

VST - WM - Parameters / Options - Output.

We won't find out anyway, highly unlikely that Tone2 come here and talk freely about how watermarking is implemented.

Oh, and checking over laptop speakers as a proof is highly doubtable too...

Again, you bring up the T word, and i havent mentioned them, i havent been talking about anything specific except AWT# software, and hypotheticals.

I dont care what T word does. AWT# is a different story, they have something for sale that i can buy for watermarking.

Laptop speakers are an important factor IMO, as are $3 dollar headphones, 128 mp3s, car stereos, etc. But that is just one part of the puzzle. The maker says theres some cases, where you may hear artifacts, so maybe on some highend equip, youll hear it just as much as you would on laptop speakers, hence my earlier question.

[chk071]

i think it would be pretty counterproductive when you program a synth, screw at its sound until you think it fits right, then implement some obscure copy protection which wrecks the sound again. Get my point?

No i dont get your point. What youre describing, is different than what i was discussing. We were talking about on the fly watermarking, meaning, the watermark would be there from the start, not let you tweak stuff, and when youre done tweaking stuff, magically inject. These watermarks are inaudible, or so says the dev. Why would it wreck the sound?

There was some guy who posted that he is able to hear the difference. On his laptop speakers.

[chk071]

I dont care what T word does. AWT# is a different story, they have something for sale that can buy for watermarking.

Good, then nevermind. So drilled on the Tone2 stuff, as it was present from post 1, and i hardly read anything apart from it.

[xNiMiNx]

i think it would be pretty counterproductive when you program a synth, screw at its sound until you think it fits right, then implement some obscure copy protection which wrecks the sound again. Get my point?

No i dont get your point. What youre describing, is different than what i was discussing. We were talking about on the fly watermarking, meaning, the watermark would be there from the start, not let you tweak stuff, and when youre done tweaking stuff, magically inject. These watermarks are inaudible, or so says the dev. Why would it wreck the sound?

There was some guy who posted that he is able to hear the difference. On his laptop speakers.

Thats kind of my point. The dev says 'as with all realworld tech, in some cases things will be audible'. Laptops are a pretty common thing around the world, and so is people listening to music on them.

So going back like 8 pages, my concerns still hold. This tech seems amazing, i just wonder and fear what happens in the future when it is commonplace to have watermarking on multiple stages, how audible it will really be. And my other question, i wonder how many sample libs have watermarks, and people say they dont like the sound of it, due to the watermark, but they dont know that is (in combination with equip) causing a sound artifact.

Do i need to finally set a signature, stating i dont care about T word? Check the thread where they released their freebie a few days ago, i thanked them, and praised them for the EULA they attached to it.

[HunterKiller]

I just finished a CD that was so bad I pissed on it. Does that qualify as watermarking?

[Davias]

I just did an A/B invert comparison in Audacity on the files Brahms-in.wav and Brahms-out.wav from the examples about AWT 2 Algorithm (on the fly watermarking).

The result is a band limited signal between 1280 and 5000 Hz, peaking at -45dB at 1280 Hz and falling down to >75dB at 5000 Hz.

I'm not sure if I did the test right (I loaded the 2 wavefiles in a project, I invert one (I guess it invert the phase), and I mixed the 2 tracks together).
You can do the test at home ^^

Edit : I did the same with example files from AWT 1 and the resulting file show a spectrum that peak around -48 dB at 1800 Hz decaying slowly to -88dB at 14000 Hz. Lots of little peaks.

[osiris]

All you need to do is get SoundForge. If you see a number after Extra Chunks, that's usually some DRM/watermark stuff. SF will show you everything (if you know where/how to look...

[Igro]

How about the phase cancellation test?

[chk071]

All you need to do is get SoundForge. If you see a number after Extra Chunks, that's usually some DRM/watermark stuff.

What does it mean?

[ENV1]

I hear that watermarks are pointless anyway because they vaporize when the content is burned to CD.

I also hear that developers were considering acidmarks and firemarks as a replacement, but the former didnt work on anything that contained a 303 and the latter were completely ineffective on hot music.

Is this true?