KVR Audio

Soarer · Post by **Soarer** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 8:55 am

Yes I have often wanted something like this too! Would make a lot of creative sense

acousticglue · Post by **acousticglue** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 10:42 am

The specops is quite high on CPU, will this be fixed? I am seeing 40+%

mt3 · Post by **mt3** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 3:53 pm

acousticglue wrote:The specops is quite high on CPU, will this be fixed? I am seeing 40+%

Welcome to the magical world of nontrivial and nonlinear fx processing!
Free unicorn rides!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from the spinning beach ball of death.

thelizard · Post by **thelizard** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 4:03 pm

acousticglue wrote:The specops is quite high on CPU, will this be fixed? I am seeing 40+%

Try disabling OpenGL in the Options menu (with the gear icon). Does that help at all?

cron · Post by **cron** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 5:06 pm

shonky wrote:Just wondering, is there going to be a point when these UA plugs will become fully modular so that you can take modulation from one plug and use that to modulate parameters on the others or is that just crazy talk?

Obviously you could just copy modulation settings to the other plugs if you wanted say envelopes, sequencers or LFOs in sync but think it would open up some possibilities to be able to use the spectral analysis from Zip to modulate frequency range in the other plugs (e.g. delay mix could be modulated by events within Spec Ops that are sidechained and analysed in Zip but using multiple parallel rather than serial processing).

I'd been thinking something along the lines of this. When I first got Madrona Labs' Virta, I was blown away by the possibility of having things like brightness and centroid as modulators. If Unfiltered Audio were to add the analysis modes from Zip to the input follower modulator in all their plugs, I think I'd wet myself.

Congratulations on the release chaps! Sadly I've blown my plugin budget for the foreseeable future on SpecOps, but I'm looking forward to picking this one up further down the line.

Soarer · Post by **Soarer** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 5:47 pm

Or they could add theses analysis modes to the input followers in their modulation system along with attack and decay time. But the interconnections would be really cool.

c_voltage · Post by **c_voltage** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 6:54 pm

acousticglue wrote:The specops is quite high on CPU, will this be fixed? I am seeing 40+%

Hm, strange, even with my really old PC i not noticed significant cpu usage, though did check all presets. Though there is some cases when usage slightly increase, depended from fft size perhaps, but in general usage range does not exceed more than 6-9% to one core for me in most cases (presets). That I think is good result for spectral processing (just i has what to compare

.

acousticglue · Post by **acousticglue** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 10:27 pm

try ranges of 4096 or higher then you get CPU and no I'm not going to disable OpenGL as that is counterproductive

thelizard · Post by **thelizard** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:05 pm

acousticglue wrote:try ranges of 4096 or higher then you get CPU and no I'm not going to disable OpenGL as that is counterproductive

There's a note in the manual regarding the link between CPU usage and windows sizes... The larger the window size, the larger the CPU spikes will be. It does this because it has to process a larger batch of information for each effect. There are also notes about which effects are the most expensive. Smear and Decapitate are particularly intensive, since Smear needs to calculate all neighbors within the Smear width, while Decapitate is iterative. Everything is multiplied by the fact that we're doing an overlap-add technique to produce higher quality results.

My best recommendation is to freeze tracks that need the larger window sizes.

c_voltage · Post by **c_voltage** » Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:55 pm

acousticglue wrote:try ranges of 4096 or higher then you get CPU and no I'm not going to disable OpenGL as that is counterproductive

I check again, well, about lower border maybe i did understate a bit, but anyway overall result keep approx 9%. And what interesting, cases with maximal cpu usage (incl. when i switch manually FFT size to maximum, 32768) show almost the same result, about 10%, but with little cpu spikes).
As a proof i uploaded video (with Studio One 3 cpu usage meter, Windows 64bit), in which can see cpu usage in various modes and with various fft sizes. http://www.mediafire.com/file/g70web8b6 ... ps_cpu.mp4
The OpenGL feature not disabled here.

And keep in mind please - this is CPU from 2009 year (Core2Quad Q9505)
(also i did check in Ableton Live for just in case - result the same)

As well, i guess audiocard (asio) buffer value can done significant influence to this, i use 512 samples, due to often use various spectral processing plugins (which really do not like low buffer values).

acousticglue · Post by **acousticglue** » Thu Oct 26, 2017 10:33 pm

well on this one I always use no higher than 128 buffers. I play guitar through plugins real time. Hence plugins made for mixing I have to pass on unless compressors etc

acousticglue · Post by **acousticglue** » Thu Oct 26, 2017 10:34 pm

Oh and it's a cool plugin. Can do some nice things with it.

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Oct 30, 2017 9:02 pm

cron wrote:
shonky wrote:Just wondering, is there going to be a point when these UA plugs will become fully modular so that you can take modulation from one plug and use that to modulate parameters on the others or is that just crazy talk?

Obviously you could just copy modulation settings to the other plugs if you wanted say envelopes, sequencers or LFOs in sync but think it would open up some possibilities to be able to use the spectral analysis from Zip to modulate frequency range in the other plugs (e.g. delay mix could be modulated by events within Spec Ops that are sidechained and analysed in Zip but using multiple parallel rather than serial processing).
I'd been thinking something along the lines of this. When I first got Madrona Labs' Virta, I was blown away by the possibility of having things like brightness and centroid as modulators. If Unfiltered Audio were to add the analysis modes from Zip to the input follower modulator in all their plugs, I think I'd wet myself.

Congratulations on the release chaps! Sadly I've blown my plugin budget for the foreseeable future on SpecOps, but I'm looking forward to picking this one up further down the line.

I bought it anyway.

fforet · Post by **fforet** » Tue Nov 28, 2017 11:30 am

As I was primarily searching for sth to replace spectrumworx I was disappointed a bit at first, but of course this is no replacement but rather a new nice plugin.
Great routing options, not so sure about the sound, like whatever settings you use the results sounds similar, maybe I have to get further into it.

I think I keep working with spectrumworx for my spectral sidechain needs, even if it crashes sometimes but with some tweaks it is almost stable for me in fl 12.5
wouldnt live without it

What are your thoughts with specops vs specworx?
anyway great software from unfiltered audio, just hoped for more.

cron · Post by **cron** » Tue Nov 28, 2017 2:04 pm

fforet wrote:What are your thoughts with specops vs specworx?

They're far more different than I was expecting. Spectrumworx is a bit of a tweaky geek-out, while SpecOps is extremely accessible.

The main takeaway for me is that it's extremely difficult to turn SpecOps to mush. It handles phase info in a really intelligent way, meaning that drums and other transient material tends to remain crisp even at larger window sizes. The Fault 1.0 window is a good choice to minimise this behaviour when required though - I tend to use that window when pitch/frequency shifting 'dirty' material full of pops and clicks, like my collection of old gramophone recordings. In Spectrumworx you had to do this kind of thing manually, and version 2.0 dropping to 5 slots from (IIRC) the 8 slots in 1.0 meant there was never quite enough room to do what I wanted. A few slots were always wasted dealing with phase, or moving in and out of pvd mode.

SpecOps really goes to the next level once you start messing with the modulation system though. It's incredibly responsive for an FFT plug-in. Even stuff like 16th note saw modulations to get 'percussive' effects are nice and snappy at higher window sizes. The spectral compander is a godsend too. IIRC there was nothing remotely like that in Spectrumworx.

So yeah, it's not quite the all-out Spectrumworx replacement I was hoping for, but I'm still really pleased with it. A few more effect modules and some sidechain modules would be really nice. Even just a sidechain option for the input follower would expand its capabilities a lot. I'd also like to see the freeze modules tweaked so they 'freshly' freeze the latest material instead of 'remembering the previous freeze' when slamming from 0 to 100%. It's easy enough to work around though - a momentary 0.1% before slamming to 100% does the trick.

Overall though, I absolutely love it. Its range may be smaller than Spectrumworx', but the sound quality across that range is outstanding. I'm addicted to fuzzy-freezing the spectrum then using the clipper module so the frozen frame seems to 'swell' like a gong. That effect has found it's way into a few prerecorded DJ sets of mine.

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