Voxengo

You think Correlometers are helpful? Yes?

But what if you could have one correlometer per up to 64 frequency bands to determine where phase issues exactly lie in the signal? Wouldn't that be absolutely amazing?

Well, now you have. And it's even for free.

You can scale the monitor however you want (if you only want to see the area from 0 to +1.0 or -1.0 to 0) and as Voxengo plugin, you also can costumize the colors of the GUI to your taste. Plus you can even compare the left or right channel to a sidechain feed.

Another so helpful and free tool from Voxengo, I can't understand why isn't more popular. Isn't that developer awesome?

[Note before: This plugin is listed as "No longer available" but it is in fact still available through the developer's website].

With this plugin you can add short chunks of beeps (either of the same tone or various -> "Variation" parameter), white noise or muted breaks to your audio.


The beeps do what they should, but don't sound very pleasant. White noise comes in and goes out abruptly.

I think the most useful mode of this device is just using muted breaks, of which you can even set the volume of with the "Gain" parameter.

Downsides:

1. The protecting noises only can stay for a maximum of 1,5 second and work dependent upon a regular interval in time. There is no option you can create a long and persisting protector noise.

2. The sound chunks of 1,5 sec come in with no fade-in or fade-out, which can really be annoying to listen to. Especially when you want that your protector sounds are noticable loud. Here a fade-in and fade-out could have build a way easier and pleasant transition.

This plugin belongs to a niche of plugins and is even in the niche a very unique thing. I don't want to disregard it to much, so I still give 4 stars, but I doubt it can be really helpful even for its own purpose.

Usually I'm a fan of Voxengo plugins, it is a great developer, but Tempo Delay does not really convince me. Also it can even be dangerous to damage your ears or hardware (more to that in a second).

But let's start at the beginning.

The basic idea of this delay is equally interesting as also kind of strange. "Tempo Delay", as the name suggest, is focusing on tempo (bpm) as rather note or millisecond values like in traditional delays.

I like if something is going its own path straight against the main stream, but the implementation here is what gives me pain.

1. Setting up the delay times both, the initial delay by "Delay" and the succeding repetitions "Rep Period", requires too many time and brain cells in my opinion. "100%" equals 1/4 at set "4/4" beat.

"25%" = (1/4 * 0,25) = 1/16
"50%" = (1/4 * 0,5) = 1/8
"200%" = (1/4 * 2) = 1/2
"300%" = (1/4 * 3) = 3/4

Now maybe it is just me with being used to traditional delays, but just setting in a "1/8" for a pre-delay and "1/4" for the actual delay works way faster and more uncomplicated.

But what really gives me trouble is the "Feedback" parameter in conjunction with a missing "Clear" button, to clear out the cache.

2. The "Feedback" parameter is set -12 by default. Exceeding the value of around -6 gives you an upward feedback loop, that is, a feedback whose volume increases by every repetition.

As you might can think, this leads to trouble.

Resulting in an extremely clipped signal which, since you have no killswitch, remains persistent as long as you let the plugin in chain. Using the "bypass" button in the topline of every Voxengo plugin does not stop that, only a bypass of the Host gives quick help here.

Indeed, some people might want an upward feedback for sound experiments, but in this ccase the plugin needs a limiter and/or said clear functionality to stop the madness. This, unfortunately, is not provided here.

As a fan of using dail in long Feedbacks, this makes this plugin a pain in the a$$ or better ears for me.

Other negative things:

3. The "Gain" parameters can not be rolled down completely. The Gain for the delays themselves is only reducable by -24, the general "Wet Gain" by -40, and "Dry Gain" by -12 only. What if I want to completely silence a specific signal?

4. Delays only up to a maximum of a 3/4th note. You can't create delays longer than that.

I like the Filter and Tremolo sections as well as the panning dials for each stereo channel but that doesn't really equalize the aforementioned disadvantages of this plugin in my opinion.

You can give it a try nonetheless since it is free, if you are interested in something new, but I recommend using different delays just for the sake of faster achievements and better functionality.

[Note before: I don't know why it is described on KVR as "No Longer Available", you can still download it at the Voxengo website for free.].

My review:

Might be the best free M/S-Tool on the market.

It does allow you to do so much things when you dig around with M/S-processing.

You can not only use it as M/S-encoder and decoder, it also gives the possibility to adjust, the volume of sum (mid) and the difference (sides), pan them whereever you want in the stereofield, swap 180* degree phase, swap them with each other and mute to listen to one specific channel for mixing. Plus you have a vectoscope to the right side to visualize the changes in real time and a correlator and stereo balance viszualizer at the bottom.

Also as it is a Voxengo plugin, you can costumize the visualizations of the plugin, like I encounter nowhere else on the market.

Really great tool every mixer should have unless you haven't something similar (which will be hard to find).

Candy at last:
A TIP you can find in the manual: By clicking CTRL/CMD and dragging either Mid or the SIDE one of the Gain or Pan knobs, the other also moves in parallel to the movement of your mouse. If you do RIGHTMOUSE-click and drag, the movements are interpolated.

"Stereo Touch" is a great and unique stereo widener/spatial effect. Usually effects which have the purpose to "widen" the stereo field use Mid/Side processing and enhance the Sides and/or reduce the Mid by gain. This plugin however is in the niche, of using a single, no-feedback delay (optionally it offers a second one of this), which after my test seems to be panned just a little throughout the stereo field (from left to right) during time.

Voxengo says that it is ment for mono signals but if you feed stereo signals into it, it will take both the left and right channel, and create a specific stereoized delay (a stereo signal) for each mono channel and at the end of the chain both independent stereo signals are merged together to create the signal which is coming out of it.

To be honest, I will mostly use it exactly for that purpose; to enhance the stereo signal of already stereo signals, because it sounds great.

It is very strange, but it works very well. It does not sound like a usual stereo widener and I would prefer to use it not really as alternative as rather an effective addition to a spatial enhancement chain, along with my other stereo widening tools.

You can even get a completely different sound out of it, than you intended to do. For example, If I dial in also Delay 2, the effect sounds very like a vintage and vinyl slapback delay. Also when you adjust slowly the delay parameters by f.e. using automation, you can get a very cool phasy and tremolo-like "Lo-Fi" sound with (!caution) crackle sounds.

So you can even use "Stereo Touch" for sound design if you favor other tools for spatial editing.

Plus, as Voxengo plugin, it also offers you almost a completely visually costumizable user interface in the settings, so you can make the plugin look like you want.

I can highly recommend this plugin, and won't miss it in my plugin library.

Also check out Voxengo for other free and paid plugins, this is an incredible developer. If you into spatial editing like me, don't forget to take a look at the MSED plugin (free mid/side tool).

Honestly, there is no reason why you shouldn't get this plugin. I know you might think you don't need it or you already have a spectrum analyzer in your DAW either as a plugin or inside one of your EQ's but SPAN is different.

I used Ableton Live's own Spectrum plugin as well as the spectral analysis in EQ Eight before, and I liked it. Used it to find annoying frequencies but also harmonics. But there were two problems in terms of that I couldn't zoom in an area I needed more in-depth visualization and to have the spectrum analyzer at a certain place on my screen.

Now with SPAN it was possible to zoom in when you hold down [ALT] and place/resize the GUI whereever/however I want since.

But I didn't know that it offers so much more.

It is possible to look individually at the Mid or the Side channel (Mid-Side Stereo mode) or Left or Right channel (Dual Mono). A heavy feature for mixing.

You also have the option to listen to a specific frequency band by holding [CTRL] or [CMD] while you dragging around the cursor, which also helps to find problematic frequencies by ear.

Then you got the Meters to the right and bottom side, which helps you take control over the volume and Mono compatibility of your mix. But you also can hide them.

As a Voxengo plugin, you furthermore can costumize the GUI visually in the settings of the plugin to you likes. Especially for an analyzer a very good feature.

If you want to take control and get a visual help, SPAN is the way to go and it's completely free.

(I liked the other review. There you can find all information of how to use this plugin. But after more than 10 years of the old review, I want to add something to it and tell you why I give this plugin 5 out of 5 stars, and not just 4.)

When you first take a look at the plugin, it doesn't actually quite look very nice. The UI is a little confusing and you don't know what to do with it. I got it for a long time in my plugin library now, but never used it until today because I didn't understand how to use it properly.

It is actually quite simple. Way simpler than it looks like.

You have the top section, where you can delay the signal in milliseconds (MSEC) and the bottom section, where you can delay the signal in samples. Both sections work additionally, so the final delay is the sum of both. If you let one section out it is fairly okay; then only the delay of the other is counted.

Each dial belongs to a decimal position of either a millisecond or sample, and just like a mathematical abacus (if you're familiar with this stone-old math device), You're adding entities of units and units to get a sum. F.e. you pull the dial of the parameter x0.1 to the value 2, and the parameter x0.01 to 3, and you will get a delay of 1 millisecond (msec) * (0.1 * 2) * (0.01 * 3) = 0,23 milliseconds.

x1 milliseconds = 0,001 second
x10 milliseconds = 0,01 second
x100 milliseconds = 0,1 second
x1000 milliseconds = 1 second.

Adding samples works similar.

As a help, you can get the resulting value easily in each seaction by reading the values inside of the black boxes below dials together.

Now if you don't like calculating like this to get the value you desire, you also have the option to type in the delay value (ms) in the field at the top right corner of each section directly.

The summary max in the recent version is 12 seconds, that is all knobs panned to the right.
So you can create delays from 0.01 milliseconds up to 12 seconds now.

What to add?

The routing of the other reviewer is fairly much complexer than necessary because, and that is the reason why this plugin earns 5 stars, you can do this already inside of the plugin itself (giving the premise that the signal is already stereo, even tough it might be just pseudo stereo - dual mono).

This plugin has the possibility to delay the right and/or the left channel (Dual Mono mode) or the Mid and/or Side channel (Mid-Side Stereo mode) independently. No hard setup or routing required.

Even in the terms of Mid/side processing this makes this plugin very outstanding. You might be able to find alternative plugin to delay either the left or righ channel of a stereo signal, but not a single one to do this with the sum and difference.

Tube Amp now offers two different modes. The first one is more subtle and refers to a warmy tube saturation. The second mode gives you a more "in your face" distortion sound.

Both modes sound good and can be used for different scenarios.

Other new features are oversampling up to 8X (2x, 4x, 8x) and a soft limiter function for the output signal.

For distortion and saturation effects, I personally prefer a "Wet/Dry Mix"-knob over the implemented "Dry Mix" one, because it gives you better control on how much non-linear distortion it adds to the signal as rather dealing the dry signal back in.

Rolling down the "Drive" and "Bias" parameters individually isn't a great substitute as you can't do this simultaneously which ends up that you change the actual sound instead of getting a clean volume reduction.

As of this reason, I might prefer a different plugin when I need more subtle changes.

But a good free plugin to get.