Dancing Boy VCA

[camsr]

I really like this plugin! It's extremely fast to operate and the parallel compression metering is fantastic! I have nothing bad to say about it.

[K82]

Love it too , it's my favorite after trying like 20 compressors,

[mystran]

It was in development several years, went through at least 3 complete GUI redesigns (and several name changes), For the algorithm itself, I tried at least several dozen different variations before I arrived at the current one, then tried it against a couple of others. I had a pretty specific vision for the actual sound and behavior when I started and I think it's fairly close to what I wanted to do. It's also almost certainly the most extensively tuned thing that I've ever done.

[fese]

Very so! I bought I immediately when released and am still impressed by how it can go from transparent to devastation with a few knob turns. I think it has never gotten the publicity it deserved, not even on KVR where there are usually hysterical multi page threads even before something is released.
Mystran, your vision for the sound shows in the plugin, it has a special sound that you won't find that easy in all the other compressor plugins out there (granted, I don't know them all).
That being said, the GUI, while perfectly usable and legible, could be a bit bigger for me still.

[mystran]

That being said, the GUI, while perfectly usable and legible, could be a bit bigger for me still.

With my current plugins (including this one) I'm generally trying to keep the interfaces as small as possible, without making them ridiculously tight or hard to read, etc. The reason for this is to make them easy to work with on systems with smaller screen resolutions too.

On the other hand, "recently" on many systems the DPI has been increasing again. For a long time it was more or less in the 75-120 range or so (making a fixed ~100 dpi design work fine across most displays) but if you have a screen that's closer to 300 dpi then the "minimum legible font size" is not necessarily ideal anymore.

So just like everyone else, at some point I'd like to be able to scale my interface more or less arbitrarily. Unfortunately though, currently nothing in my framework is really ready for this (lots of stuff hard-coded to work with pixel metrics), so it'll take some redesign to convert various things to use scalable metrics and it's something I'll probably do in some new plugins first, then possibly convert older stuff eventually.

[fese]

That being said, the GUI, while perfectly usable and legible, could be a bit bigger for me still.

...
On the other hand, "recently" on many systems the DPI has been increasing again. For a long time it was more or less in the 75-120 range or so (making a fixed ~100 dpi design work fine across most displays) but if you have a screen that's closer to 300 dpi then the "minimum legible font size" is not necessarily ideal anymore.

So just like everyone else, at some point I'd like to be able to scale my interface more or less arbitrarily. Unfortunately though, currently nothing in my framework is really ready for this (lots of stuff hard-coded to work with pixel metrics), so it'll take some redesign to convert various things to use scalable metrics and it's something I'll probably do in some new plugins first, then possibly convert older stuff eventually.

Yeah, I guess it's a bitch for developers, nowadays apart from different OSes and plugin formats they also have to cope with different screen resolutions.
It's not really a problem for me, on my screen everything's still very legible, it is more of a "could be" feeling instead of a "needs to be"

[camsr]

I actually thought it was a bit too big on my 1920x1200 screen. I sit close to it, so nothing's really small, just oversized

[camsr]

Instead of an arbitrary scaling, you could more easily implement a set of fixed scalings, as some small multiple of 16 (most common screen width)

[mystran]

Instead of an arbitrary scaling, you could more easily implement a set of fixed scalings, as some small multiple of 16 (most common screen width)

Oh, I didn't mean "arbitrary" in the "continuously variable" sense, rather in the "as large as you want" sense in some fixed zoom increments (such that at small sizes everything can still align nicely to the pixel grid).

Most of my components already calculate their own sizes automatically (and many of them can draw at various sizes actually). The problem is, all this size and layout calculation is done with "hard-coded" pixel metrics. So the solution involves defining a master "unit metric" sort of like a font em-size, then calculating all the other metrics from that master metric. At that point it'll be a simple matter of changing the size of the unit metric at run-time to change the scale.

Now, if one constrains the unit-metric to integer pixels, then one gets a fixed set of zoom levels, but it's still possible to align stuff (for any zoom level, where it matters) to the pixel grid simply by using integer multiples of the unit size. This is pretty much what I'm thinking of doing.

edit: also I will probably go back to vector graphics for controls like knobs, since bitmaps tend to blur a lot when scaled .. so I'll also need to redesign graphics for the purpose.

[VariKusBrainZ]

So I finally decided I was going to purchase only to discover its no longer for sale, darn

[richinmusic]

What are the demo restrictions on this? I was also hoping to buy it, and am using the demo, and I am not experiencing any restrictions....

[bungle]

I have no idea why smaller developers like this even sell stuff anymore, the VAT laws are designed in such a way that they can never make any money.
The trick is to make everything donationware with a minimum donation, its disgusting how all this VAT crap has happened because developers like Signal dust are much needed

[mystran]

Well, unfortunately trying to cope with the new VAT legislation is currently totally unrealistic for me right now. It's not even a question of making money, it's simply not realistic at all (even at loss). Possibly at some point I will try to find a solution (eg. some 3rd party channel or some such), but right now I don't really have time for that.

[DuX]

Shame, it's a really interesting sounding compressor. The demo restriction? You get crappy sound every now and then. How come you haven't noticed? So how to get it, I wonder? Your plugins are top-notch mystran.