Everything you want to know about Studio One 3.2

[RockinMillie]

What big changes ?
Other than the utter nonsense console thing, the rest are very procedural evolutions of what is already there, not really big changes, just very very good updates of pre 3.2 features.

I agree that there was nothing massively earth shattering in the 3.2 update

I also agree with you to a point that the Console FX feature was hyped up somewhat.
Personally, I am probably unlikely to use it myself as it stands at the moment (I think that if one wishes to get an 'analogue sound', then one should use analogue hardware a la Jimmy Sutton's Hi-Style studio http://www.histylerecords.com/#studio-about-section).

Having said that, there are a lot of users who go in for all that vintage / analogue emulation stuff (Slate et al) who will probably like it.

However, in terms of DAW architecture the changes that were made to the audio engine to implement Console FX were quite significant and depending on which third party developers get on board is potentially quite interesting for the future.
I don't have a problem with it being proprietary given the track record of the Presonus implementation of ARA and the general good quality of their stock plugs.

In total, other things such as the smart tool, VCA faders and more importantly, changes to some of the editing behaviour of the DAW (which BTW were not even mentioned at all in the Studio One Expert video) in addition to the Console FX engine make the 3.2 update quite significant for a x.1 point release.
It seemed more like a x.5 release to me. That's just my opinion, of course YMMV

I personally have not noticed any difference in CPU or memory utilisation between this update and v2.6.5 - again YMMV

[ghettosynth]

What big changes ?
Other than the utter nonsense console thing, the rest are very procedural evolutions of what is already there, not really big changes, just very very good updates of pre 3.2 features.

I agree that there was nothing massively earth shattering in the 3.2 update

I also agree with you to a point that the Console FX feature was hyped up somewhat.
Personally, I am probably unlikely to use it myself as it stands at the moment (I think that if one wishes to get an 'analogue sound', then one should use analogue hardware a la Jimmy Sutton's Hi-Style studio http://www.histylerecords.com/#studio-about-section).

Having said that, there are a lot of users who go in for all that vintage / analogue emulation stuff (Slate et al) who will probably like it.

I'm not sure that I want to get involved in this thread, but, I did watch the video. I might demo Studio One just to play with this myself, but, I'm really curious what users think about the feature?

So, I can really see the value of modeling a summing stage that saturates. Maybe there's some value to the noise and the crosstalk, but in the video, it was never demonstrated how much impact those features have on the resulting sound. I do use a few vintage console plugins, but I've yet to turn on the noise or the 60hz hum.

Seems a bit gimmicky to me, but maybe it's a good way to emulate a summing environment like that. I'm not really convinced by the video, but perhaps this is something interesting to discuss?

[bungle]

What big changes ?
Other than the utter nonsense console thing, the rest are very procedural evolutions of what is already there, not really big changes, just very very good updates of pre 3.2 features.

I agree that there was nothing massively earth shattering in the 3.2 update

I also agree with you to a point that the Console FX feature was hyped up somewhat.
Personally, I am probably unlikely to use it myself as it stands at the moment (I think that if one wishes to get an 'analogue sound', then one should use analogue hardware a la Jimmy Sutton's Hi-Style studio http://www.histylerecords.com/#studio-about-section).

Having said that, there are a lot of users who go in for all that vintage / analogue emulation stuff (Slate et al) who will probably like it.

I'm not sure that I want to get involved in this thread, but, I did watch the video. I might demo Studio One just to play with this myself, but, I'm really curious what users think about the feature?

So, I can really see the value of modeling a summing stage that saturates. Maybe there's some value to the noise and the crosstalk, but in the video, it was never demonstrated how much impact those features have on the resulting sound. I do use a few vintage console plugins, but I've yet to turn on the noise or the 60hz hum.

Seems a bit gimmicky to me, but maybe it's a good way to emulate a summing environment like that. I'm not really convinced by the video, but perhaps this is something interesting to discuss?

Having done some development and spoken to a lot of other developers about this idea (to be clear here, this is not a new idea, you can find various threads discussing it over lots of years) i have yet to find a single developer who thinks this is useful in any way shape or form.

The fact that users even in this thread are trying to suggest that VST plugins inserted in any mix in any DAW are not part of the summing of that mux or DAW, well it is quite quite stunning !!

This should have been done as VST with extensions (probably close to what it is) and completely open to indy developers, it isn't.

[ghettosynth]

What big changes ?
Other than the utter nonsense console thing, the rest are very procedural evolutions of what is already there, not really big changes, just very very good updates of pre 3.2 features.

I agree that there was nothing massively earth shattering in the 3.2 update

I also agree with you to a point that the Console FX feature was hyped up somewhat.
Personally, I am probably unlikely to use it myself as it stands at the moment (I think that if one wishes to get an 'analogue sound', then one should use analogue hardware a la Jimmy Sutton's Hi-Style studio http://www.histylerecords.com/#studio-about-section).

Having said that, there are a lot of users who go in for all that vintage / analogue emulation stuff (Slate et al) who will probably like it.

I'm not sure that I want to get involved in this thread, but, I did watch the video. I might demo Studio One just to play with this myself, but, I'm really curious what users think about the feature?

So, I can really see the value of modeling a summing stage that saturates. Maybe there's some value to the noise and the crosstalk, but in the video, it was never demonstrated how much impact those features have on the resulting sound. I do use a few vintage console plugins, but I've yet to turn on the noise or the 60hz hum.

Seems a bit gimmicky to me, but maybe it's a good way to emulate a summing environment like that. I'm not really convinced by the video, but perhaps this is something interesting to discuss?

Having done some development and spoken to a lot of other developers about this idea (to be clear here, this is not a new idea, you can find various threads discussing it over lots of years) i have yet to find a single developer who thinks this is useful in any way shape or form.

I get that the idea isn't new. That wasn't what I was really trying to get to.

The fact that users even in this thread are trying to suggest that VST plugins inserted in any mix in any DAW are not part of the summing of that mux or DAW, well it is quite quite stunning !!

So, of course they are.

This should have been done as VST with extensions (probably close to what it is) and completely open to indy developers, it isn't.

I don't know. If you're just talking about a simple saturating amplifier stage working independently then sure, a VST will work fine and you can put it on each track, and then on the busses as well. If you want to then control their degree of saturation relative to input level as a unit, you need to use some sort of interprocess communication so that when you adjust one, they all adjust, not impossible for sure. Still, a bit more complicated than independent channels.

But, this kind of gets to what I was trying to get at though, the crosstalk and noise. Because if I'm feeding the crosstalk into the stage, then that might have some impact and crosstalk is an audio signal from adjacent channels. So now your communication between plugin instances just got a bit more complicated.

On other hand, at the "audio engine", which is to say DAW mixing level, all of those audio signals are readily available and crosstalk is just another calculation.

Of course, it could be implemented easily as an N channel mixing plugin, but that wouldn't be as flexible.

So I guess I can't say that I see the choice to embed this at the engine level to be fundamentally flawed, my question is more about whether mixing in crosstalk and noise is actually useful? Does it really impact the sound in a positive way?

[tooneba]

Those guys (not all the same exact guys but the owners) run 5 websites IIRC. The company is Premium Production Expert. They run the PT Expert, Logic Expert, Ableton Live Expert, Reason Expert & Studio One Expert websites ...

What if we asked them which daw has the best audio engine?

[bungle]

So I guess I can't say that I see the choice to embed this at the engine level to be fundamentally flawed, my question is more about whether mixing in crosstalk and noise is actually useful? Does it really impact the sound in a positive way?

It doesn't matter if the idea is flawed, what most people seem to be dancing around and ignoring, these so called 'Mix engine' plugins could have esaily conformed to the VST standard with extensions and not some proprietary format that then only has 1 or 2 developers ever getting on board, all we are talking about here is an interlinked audio processing, nothing, repeat, nothing particularly special in terms of the actual input/output/linking.
Wasted development time that is entirely pushed towards creating an insular eco system (Something that has not worked out well for anybody else who has tried it, only open formats have worked)

[ghettosynth]

So I guess I can't say that I see the choice to embed this at the engine level to be fundamentally flawed, my question is more about whether mixing in crosstalk and noise is actually useful? Does it really impact the sound in a positive way?

It doesn't matter if the idea is flawed, what most people seem to be dancing around and ignoring, these so called 'Mix engine' plugins could have esaily conformed to the VST standard with extensions and not some proprietary format that then only has 1 or 2 developers ever getting on board, all we are talking about here is an interlinked audio processing, nothing, repeat, nothing particularly special in terms of the actual input/output/linking.

I understand your position, I don't completely agree. Each instance of the plugin would have to receive a crosstalk audio stream from each other instance along with metadata, and that's best case. If you're trying to be accurate about crosstalk then you might have to send multi-channel audio data from each instance to every other instance.

Crosstalk is not just an attenuated sum of signals, it is a sum of attenuated signals where the attenuation for each channel is some function of distance from any other particular channel. It's completely a function of board construction so how that distance is measured depends on what you are trying to emulate. It would be fun to know if crosstalk changes when you put more empty channels between two active channels.

Even if devs just ignore this aspect, there's no getting around sending an audio stream between plugin instances.

This is what I outlined above. The only way that I can see around this is to implement a VST mixer plugin. I don't know if Studio 1 has tracks that can take multiple channels, Reaper does, I've used this idea on Reaper for other reasons. I'm not convinced that would be as convenient for Studio One users. I really don't think that it would be, it's not in Reaper. If I put a mixer on a, say, 16 channel track, then I have to route my other tracks into that track. It certainly works, I'm not sure I'd go to all that effort to model crosstalk.

Wasted development time that is entirely pushed towards creating an insular eco system (Something that has not worked out well for anybody else who has tried it, only open formats have worked)

Clearly they are trying to differentiate themselves with this. But look, I have no bone to pick with Presonus, I don't really care about their business model. I'm curious about whether people feel like adding crosstalk and hum into the mixing process makes a positive difference.

[nIGhT-SoN]

It doesn't matter if the idea is flawed, what most people seem to be dancing around and ignoring, these so called 'Mix engine' plugins could have esaily conformed to the VST standard with extensions and not some proprietary format that then only has 1 or 2 developers ever getting on board, all we are talking about here is an interlinked audio processing, nothing, repeat, nothing particularly special in terms of the actual input/output/linking.
Wasted development time that is entirely pushed towards creating an insular eco system (Something that has not worked out well for anybody else who has tried it, only open formats have worked)

Please explain to me how would you implement crosstalk as a VST plugin? After you think on that tell me which is the easiest and fastest way to use, for the end user?

@ghettosynth This is the most unbiased comment I've seen since release of v3.2 update and also I think you brought up some great points. We are not talking about something unseen before, since we see it in almost any hardware mixer, it's not about the mixer emulation, it's all about how it is implemented and as it is in Studio One 3.2 right now, I find it to be the easier one to use and with less hassle involved.

[SLiC]

In total, other things such as the smart tool, VCA faders and more importantly, changes to some of the editing behaviour of the DAW (which BTW were not even mentioned at all in the Studio One Expert video) in addition to the Console FX engine make the 3.2 update quite significant for a x.1 point release.
It seemed more like a x.5 release to me. That's just my opinion, of course YMMV

I personally have not noticed any difference in CPU or memory utilisation between this update and v2.6.5 - again YMMV

Yes, even if you just ignore the console emulation all together but add in above with the new comping features, a lot of companies would have charged for that as a .5 release...presonus get some props from me for making this a free .1 release.... looing forward to the .5!

[ghettosynth]

Well, look, I'm not interested in any presonus drama. Thinking about this a bit more, I might have misinterpreted what bungle meant. There's no reason why you can't use the VST standard to load plugins at a different place in the audio stream. Reaper, for example, allows you to use input FX which are distinct from channel FX. You could load a plugin on a bus that takes input from all channels that provide data to that bus. You could even provide an active/inactive vector to determine which channels should be included in the process. The plugin has to be able to process changing input and output channels somewhat dynamically. That is, when you add a track to a bus, that bus has to now know that it has one more track to process and be able to handle that.

This would allow you to implement crosstalk at the bus level without sending audio data from the channels. Is that how it's done? Maybe it would be interesting to hear about what crosstalk actually is in 3.2? Does crosstalk at the master out level just consider the bus outputs?

That said, I still don't care whether it is or it isn't using the VST standard. It's very possible that it is exactly something like that and that the public API is still in development, I don't know really, and if it's not clear, I don't really care either.

I want to hear from users about their experience with using crosstalk and noise in their mixes.

[woodsdenis]

I want to hear from users about their experience with using crosstalk and noise in their mixes.

Ditto

What I don't understand about this is that the crosstalk is applied equally across all channels assigned to that bus, this is not in any way an SSL 4000 worked, according to Russ his insider sources said it was modelled on this. No professional analogue console behaves like this. Crosstalk in the analogue world was primarily from the tape machine where hi frequency content could bleed onto adjacent tracks, never onto all of them. Low crosstalk specs on consoles were really a given.

I assume that the input into the console is prefader, if this is true the only way to drive more into the console on an individual track is to raise the clip level ? For example on a Drum bus the only way to know that your channels were equally feeding into the console at the mix you want is to have all the faders level and do your gain staging at clip level? The advantage Slate has is to be able to group or to individually send.

If Slate does come on board then it certainly make the implementation of his system a lot easier, how he prices it is another matter.

[ghettosynth]

I want to hear from users about their experience with using crosstalk and noise in their mixes.

Ditto

What I don't understand about this is that the crosstalk is applied equally across all channels assigned to that bus, this is not in any way an SSL 4000 worked, according to Russ his insider sources said it was modelled on this.

Ok, thanks for that. I kind of suspected that they took the simpler approach. So the crosstalk in S1 is just an attenuated sum, not a sum of varying attenuation?

No professional analogue console behaves like this. Crosstalk in the analogue world was primarily from the tape machine where hi frequency content could bleed onto adjacent tracks, never onto all of them. Low crosstalk specs on consoles were really a given.

Indeed. You even had to think about this with tape and plan your channels to minimize that kind of crosstalk. I have experienced crosstalk with mixers. These were very low end mixers mind you. However, even they didn't behave that way. Crosstalk is a function of the physicality of the source of the crosstalk. That could be proximity of the channels on the board, or proximity of some routing aspect of the channels.

Some very cheap stuff might have some common crosstalk source, but I can't say that I've experience that much.

I assume that the input into the console is prefader, if this is true the only way to drive more into the console on an individual track is to raise the clip level ? For example on a Drum bus the only way to know that your channels were equally feeding into the console at the mix you want is to have all the faders level and do your gain staging at clip level? The advantage Slate has is to be able to group or to individually send.

If Slate does come on board then it certainly make the implementation of his system a lot easier, how he prices it is another matter.

By input to the console do you mean input to the console emulation effect?

[woodsdenis]

By input to the console do you mean input to the console emulation effect?

Yes

[woodsdenis]

I think the way he did it at the end is correct, the Console shaper, although only inserted on a bus is looking at all the channels assigned to that bus individually not collectively as illustrated by the crosstalk. Therefore the Slate should be on individual and bus channels.

[trimph1]

Good video.