2CAudio Precedence | 1.5 | Move Out Of Flatland. Take Precedence.

[Andrew Souter]

Moving the position cursor (addum in fact any parameter adjustment) really plays havoc with crackle through the speakers Will sub a ticket.

this is generally expected. Almost nothing can be modulated/automated/updated perfectly smoothly --- other than of course via our own internal modulation.

whenever something is updated there are pretty massive calculations that need to be recomputed, and they change in non-linear/non-continous/discrete manners, so continuously automating Position for example is not possible to do smoothly (again, other than via our own internal modulation).

What you can do is to single click anywhere in to Position Display and the Angle and Distance parameter values will jump to this location and there will be only one update, with a very small click -- almost inaudible. This will feel smoother than dragging the pos display around (as this causes many updates to happen as quickly as possible, each one resulting in a small click, so if we have 10 or 100 small clicks per second, this may sound like stuttering)

maybe in the future we would consider trying to make a version that allows full automation of the position for special effects like doppler etc that could be cool for film/tv/game sound FX... this would likely require 4-5-6 times as much CPU though... That's not the goal of this first version.

Oh my god the Full Chorus is beautiful using some Alchemy Strings. Defintately some love with the depth and richness here

great. thanks.

[Winstontaneous]

Moving the position cursor (addum in fact any parameter adjustment) really plays havoc with crackle through the speakers Will sub a ticket.

this is generally expected. Almost nothing can be modulated/automated/updated perfectly smoothly --- other than of course via our own internal modulation.

Hmm, the loud-@ss parameter changing noise kept me from buying Breeze 2.0 and that kind of thing is a real turnoff in this day & age when many equally awesome processors can be noiselessly modulated/automated. That said I respect your imagination, coding skills and product concepts.

[sqigls]

yeah I can definitely see myself using Precedence a lot, but the crackling sound...
at least with Breeze it's kinda set it and forget it. Precedence however is actually crying out for some doppler-esqe automation.

[Andrew Souter]

We understand, but if you are counting in integers lets say, there are no values between 2 and 3 to choose from so automating from 2 to 3 is not possible bc 2.5 etc does not exist. This is a good analogy for many of our algorithms. Many aspects are non-continuous/discrete. If we were to simply run two instances and cross-fade between them it wouldn't really sound much better. Plus it wold immediately be at least 2x as much CPU usage.

In Precedence what you can do is to single click anywhere in to Position Display and the Angle and Distance parameter values will jump to this location and there will be only one update, with a very small click -- almost inaudible. This will feel A LOT smoother than dragging the pos display circle around.

Precedence however is actually crying out for some doppler-esqe automation.

A future derivative version perhaps could focus on more extreme movement and full automation for extreme motion FX. This version is mostly about positioning and mixing.

Anyway, we hear you, and we know perfectly smooth automation is a popular request for all our products. It'd be cool we agree. Maybe one day. Just not a priority for v1.0.

[Andrew Souter]

One of the most annoying limitations of the usual tools for this only work properly if set specifically for either headphone or speaker listening. Does Precedence over-come this and work equally as well with both headphones and speakers? I didn't see anything on the project page about this and maybe misse it.

That is the goal, yes.

Precedence utilizes some variation of all of the above techniques, but does so in a novel manner that largely avoids the issues associated with more advanced time and spectral methods. It uses a proprietary mix of the perceptual cues humans use to locate sounds in 3D space that has be optimized specifically to work within the needs of music and professional audio production. The relative strength of these cues can even be adjusted to suite the needs of a wide variety of musical styles.

Precedence's lateral azimuth positioning ability is extremely convincing over both loudspeakers as well as headphones. It is largely mono-sum compatible even at extreme settings, and if exactly perfect mono-sum compatibility is required it can be guaranteed as needed to avoid bass cancelation in club systems for example. Precedence also offers three input modes to maximize compatibility with the needs of user's audio tracks and sample instrument libraries to avoid this additional potential source of unwanted coloration from spatial information contained within the source sound.

The HRTF and CHALLENGES section discusses this stuff also.

[pekbro]

Sigh... this is pretty excellent. The UI exhibits some heavy lag in Reaper (latest) for me.
No such lag in Live 10. Win 8.1 64...

[woggle]

I'm not getting great depth impressions from Precedence - am I missing something in the settings?

[Andrew Souter]

from another forum specifically in an orchestral/scoring context, but applies here to:

I'm still doing final web preps etc, and compiling demo sounds/mixes etc. I will be sure to come back and discuss this thoroughly here with all you guys asap.

Quickly though, the most important thing to realize regarding Distance is that for Orchestral / Scoring work, we expect/advocate the Precedence be followed by Breeze 2.1, directly on tracks. Enable P-Link in Breeze 2.1. Then set Breeze Mix/Balance to the same value as Precedence Distance. Now you will have the full expected depth/distance result.

Precedence provides 100% of the Left-Right positioning and about half of the distance positioning. Breeze 2.1 (or eventually B2 or Aether) supplies the other half.

Distance perception in enclosed spaces is very dependent on the "Direct to Reflected Energy Ratio" (i.e. Mix in standard music production terms) and also the "Initial Time Gap" (i.e. Pre-Delay in standard music production terms). Everyone knows intuitively "more verb means father away" to some extent", but there is wide misunderstanding about how to use Pre-Delay properly in a manner that agrees with other distance cues.

If you load Precedence and then Breeze on a track and set Precedence Distance and Breeze Mix to the same value the distance illusion will be completed perfectly. If you do this for 16 tracks in parallel and each has a different position in Precedence, you will have 16 instruments properly positioned with a unified space.

Without Precedence, using P-Link in Breeze will still help establish some distance cues and keep them agreeing with one another. It can be nice to work that way even without Precedence. It still gives *some* of the proper perceptual cues. Rather like simple Gain Panning gives *some* perceptual cues about Left-Right position. It works to some degree, but it can be much better when ALL perceptual cues agree with one another.

Breeze defines a space. Precedence can put the source sound anywhere you like within this space.

If you ignore "Direct to Reflected Energy Ratio" and "Initial Time Gap" cues which come from reverb, i.e. if you use ONLY Precedence, you will not get the full distance effect. But this is similar to saying if you mix your dry orchestral samples without reverb it won't sound like a real-world performance. We expect there will be reverb. And ideally that reverb will come from Breeze 2.1.

Without the distance cues related to reverb, the strongest ones are gain and high frequency loss. For music mixing you don't really want us reducing the gain of your tracks drastically based on distance. This would be physically accurate, and good for sound-FX and virtual reality, but for music mixing, it's best to let the track faders control mix levels IMHO. So we don't add any gain loss purely by distance.

We do add high frequency loss, but we do not do so in extreme manners bc this would also probably not be appropriate for music mixing. You can increase this effect by increasing the Freq Delta value.

We add other sophisticated distance cues in Precedence, but they are designed to work best in a model of an enclosed space: i.e. concert hall, or algo verb approximation thereof. The signal is pre-conditioned to expect the verb to supply the other cues. Breeze 2.1 will supply them completing the illusion. It's synergistic.

We are exploring now establishing communication between Precedence and Breeze instances, so that changing position in Precedence automatically updates Breeze as well. This was the goal all along and mentioned in the release notes, but it is taking a little extra time to get working and will come shortly in a free update.This will be the eureka moment! We hope to have that ready in the next 30-60 days. Until then for orchestral/scoring work:

Add Precedence.
Add Breeze 2.1
Enable P-Link in Breeze 2.1
Set Distance in Precedence
Set Mix/Balance in Breeze 2.1 to match Distance in Precedence


more later, with audio examples... thanks

[woggle]

from another forum specifically in an orchestral/scoring context, but applies here to:


more later, with audio examples... thanks

[/quote]

thanks Andrew

[pekbro]

This is super clever, pretty much mandatory equipment for Breeze 2 users I would think.
The positioning and subtle depth effects in conjunction with the reverb sound brilliant to me.
The stereo widening effects don't sound as impressive, for some reason, maybe my setup
Definitely, the 1 to many communication thing is a must. Be wary of Bitwig in that regard

Great stuff.

[plexuss]

I didn't buy it (yet). Playing with the demo. I can only get once instance to work at a time. I didn't check but I assume its part of the demo limitations. Anyway, I bounced out 4 tracks with it in use independently for each track bounce. This way I could get 4 different positions working with the demo.

Anyway, its kind of interesting so I thought I'd share. It's 2 tracks of percussions, choir, synth and weird plucked intrument. The percussion are places either side and towards the back. the choir is way in the back on the left. The synth is acutally travelling around the sound space making a full square around it over 4 mins of duration. I think this is where the clicking it coming from. The strange pluck is front, centre. It's Kaivo with a Seaboard - crazy stuff.

I think it sounds pretty good. It doesn't impart a lot of unpleasant artifacts like a lot of other spacial placement tools.

https://soundcloud.com/musicofplexus/pr ... -1/s-mFPCH

[Andrew Souter]

Here are a few quick examples:

https://soundcloud.com/2caudio/sets/precedence

The first is made by Beat Kaufmann, who was kind enough to make this amazing mix example! It's using VSL libraries as I understand. First the full mix with Precedence and Breeze 2 on each track. Then a mono signal as this what Precedence would have been receiving if you use the mono-input modes. Then the stereo samples, exactly as they came out of VSL with nothing else.

Other misc examples. P with B, and P alone for some ambience effects. A synth example or two. Many more to come.

The Handle Trumpet example I posted here a few months ago, while we were discussing similar topics.

[martinjuenke]

Wow, unexpected. And I discovered that there are loyalty points which can be switched into another voucher. As a result I've got this gem for zero. Thanks!
A loyal customer

[Tp3]

Few minutes into using it, I came to realize it should be called SpaHvoc (Spatial+Havoc).

Because that what it does (in a good way).

For real.

[jens]

I'm not getting great depth impressions from Precedence - am I missing something in the settings?

What? It's breathtaking!