Cerise FREE by Acustica Audio

[plexuss]

Plexxus, I have to disagree with your slightly paternalistic response.
[snip]
Before I make a commitment to downloading a +1gb plugin, which requires additional "license manager" software to be planted into my OS and also an active internet connection, I would much rather inquire beforehand whether its worth it. Audio forums like KVR are the place to go for such inquiries, if you haven't figured that out already.

You were not being clear or specific in your OP and so my reply was an attempt to address vague nature of your post. Then you insult me.

Good luck with your purchase decision. Back to making great sounding music....

[bmanic]

Plexxus, I have to disagree with your slightly paternalistic response.
[snip]
Before I make a commitment to downloading a +1gb plugin, which requires additional "license manager" software to be planted into my OS and also an active internet connection, I would much rather inquire beforehand whether its worth it. Audio forums like KVR are the place to go for such inquiries, if you haven't figured that out already.

You were not being clear or specific in your OP and so my reply was an attempt to address vague nature of your post. Then you insult me.

Good luck with your purchase decision. Back to making great sounding music....

Dude.. he didn't insult you. Please don't make me have to put you on the ignore list again. You've been quite more calm and non-crazy lately and sometimes even write quite informative and good posts.

.. don't go into crazy mode again. Please.


Also, what I just wrote above was not meant as an insult (but will probably be taken as such). It was a frustrated observation that I just typed out. Take it as you may.

[bmanic]

My question is of a practical and objective nature.

It is _always_ a matter of subjective opinion when it comes to audio. Thus Plexuss answer does provide a perspective that you should be able to extract some relevant information from.

.. but to put it a bit more clearly:

If you've never tried any Acustica Audio plugins before, then this is definitely a worthy candidate to explore the typical sound signature that Acustica Audio plugins are capable of. They are indeed quite "unique" in operation and sound, both in a positive and a negative sense.

They require some commitment to install, mainly in terms of hard disk space and the still slightly clunky installer (Aquarius) and the multiple files that get installed into the plugin directory. The plugins themselves are still quite clunky to use but if you think of them as Sample Libraries, you'll learn to tolerate the various pauses and gaps in audio when changing some settings or toggling parameters.

On the positive practical side of this particular plugin is that you get a uniquely voiced 3 band EQ that is quite nice and surprisingly versatile even when considering the limited frequency bands on offer. The most impressive part of this plugin is most likely the Drive section which does indeed replicate the classic modern Rupert Neve silk modes, red and the blue harmonic distortion circuitry. It sounds unique albeit quite a subtle effect probably for most people, even when cranked.

The compressor is indeed bugged at the moment but hopefully Acustica Audio will update it asap. When you do get it working, it sounds quite acceptable and definitely has it's own character (hint: You just have to keep the input gain very high to reach the actual working attack/release timings).

Consider this plugin (and most Acustica Audio plugins in general) as doses of salt+pepper. They are definitely not in my opinion suitable for the day to day mixing duties as workhorses but are really good as specialty plugins where you want a particular sound. The workflow with these plugins is quite similar to using hardware due to the clunky nature of operation and the high CPU usage. You'll have to make more careful considerations when and how to use them effectively but this can be a good thing in the long run. Committing and rendering results early can be a really fun and creative workflow on it's own. Highly recommend everybody tries this workflow at least a few times, even if you don't use AA plugins at all.

Personally I've moved away from using AA plugins almost entirely but I do keep some installed still and check out the new releases from time to time. My biggest reason for not using them has been reliability.. not in terms of crashing or such but in terms of having to baby sit them at almost all times. There are so many inconsistencies and problems that can arise from various combinations of parameters that it gets quite frustrating to work with a large number of AA plugins in a single project, especially if you do not know yet the at what sample rate you need to render the final output. You may start your mix at one sample rate and then decide to render it at another.. only to find specific bugs that happen at render.

[plexuss]

[Dude.. he didn't insult you. Please don't make me have to put you on the ignore list again.

Its amazing how so many people here project their foibles on others and are otherwise offensive, such as bmaniac here. My OP to this sub-thread was spot on - positive and constructive as usual. I can't account for every level of a reader's insecurity - if you can't handle it don't assume it's being directed at you, it's more likely your ego is reacting. Yes, the foe/block list is a good thing - i"ve had you on it bmaniac for years and just added another, kazi7. This way we wont' bump into each other because we obious;y rub each other the wrong way. Problem is, I peeked. I prefer gs where you can't peak at your foe post. Lesson learned: don't peek! No peaks no peeks.

[bmanic]

[Dude.. he didn't insult you. Please don't make me have to put you on the ignore list again.

Its amazing how so many people here project their foibles on others and are otherwise offensive, such as bmaniac here. My OP to this sub-thread was spot on - positive and constructive as usual. I can't account for every level of a reader's insecurity - if you can't handle it don't assume it's being directed at you, it's more likely your ego is reacting. Yes, the foe/block list is a good thing - i"ve had you on it bmaniac for years and just added another, kazi7. This way we wont' bump into each other because we obious;y rub each other the wrong way. Problem is, I peeked. I prefer gs where you can't peak at your foe post. Lesson learned: don't peek! No peaks no peeks.

It's absolutely amazing how you somehow can get "insulted" from the post by Kazi7.

Look at what you just wrote to me, then learn from it yourself. It's almost as if you are writing to yourself in a mirror. It's as if you are completely blind to your own critique of others and ignore your own outbursts and toxicity.

You've had similar very strange outbursts in the past, one of the reasons I muted you in the first place as it got so bad at one point that the signal to noise ratio was just not worth the screen space.

But yeah, I'll leave it at this and will keep you unmuted for now. Sometimes you gotta get a bit poked so that you at least sometimes get some feedback on your behavior.

[Obsolete462444]

Damn, this escalated quickly.

Thanks @bmanic for the very informative and elaborate insights, the kind of knowledge about AA's tech I was keen to understand better. It also verifies some of the impressions I gathered.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Thank you for the descriptions and comments you're posting about Cerise, and the welcome you've been giving our products lately.
I wanted to give a little bit of the developer's perspective h about some of the comments I read, and I think they're a little helpful for everyone to get an idea of what we're doing

As you may have noticed, lately I'm kind of stopping commenting on posts that either positively or negatively criticize the sound of plugins. With time we are seeing that some very balanced opinions are forming, for example, if a person describes the sound as distant from that of the hardware machine there are others maybe on the same page with a contrary opinion. I think this is what forums are for, and I think everyone has good reasons for having one opinion or the other.
The work we do is a difficult one, emulating a hardware object is an extremely complex operation and adopting a very different approach from other developers, as we do, is not an indication of a better or worse result. It's simply a different result. Sometimes it may yield a better result, sometimes it may not. I would like to make this clear, it has never occurred to us to call our system better than others. Sampling an object (an effect as we do, or a musical instrument as in the case of a classic sampler) allows you to have some advantages against some disadvantages from the sound point of view. Some types of devices are particularly complex to reproduce with an approach based on sampling, such as dynamics processors. And so on.

A criticism that I see with less and less frequency on these pages concerns the user interface and the response of plugins. While a few years ago it was normal to read a comment defining the products not practical or usable, this kind of comment is becoming less and less frequent with time, and I think it happens not only as a consequence of the optimizations that we constantly try to apply to the process but just because computers are becoming faster and faster, so also our plugins become progressively more "responsive". I'm thinking of the case of Gain Station, which by many has been defined as fast as a normal algorithmic plugin. On new processors like apple silicon, then, the result has already become impressive, so I imagine that in the next months this trend will become more and more evident. Using an M1 computer it is very difficult for me to see an appreciable difference with a classic algorithmic plugin (forgive this definition, which is improper: it is just a way to describe the result obtained with a classic implementation based on circuit analysis and/or component modeling).

The speech that interests me more is instead the one related to Aquarius, just as a software distribution platform
I try to explain why it has become important, or even necessary, for us. Our products are generally very large, they have an average occupation of a few gigabytes (samples take up a lot of space on disk and also in memory). A classic installer, like the ones we used in the past, would become a real hell for users. In fact, Aquarius acts incrementally, and apart from supporting the downgrade of a product to any previous version (it's a feature we haven't seen yet in any other competitor, I don't know if I'm wrong) it allows our users to download the minimum amount of data at each update.
It's a fantastic tool, and from our point of view, it's the main motivation behind our exponential growth: right now for example we have peak installations of 35 plugins per minute, and I consider it an outstanding result considering the size of our plugin.
Only with Cerise, released a few hours ago, we reached the quota of 30 thousand plugins installed, and half tens of thousands of other plugins installed.
Obviously, every system, no matter how performing or constantly updated, can have problems. We are available to check all these problems if you are interested in solving them, so I suggest you open a ticket. Surprisingly, the tickets we receive are very few, and even the logs of failed installations we see on the servers are rare. I can deduce that most of the problems are focused on the installation of Aquarius or the resolution of the initial login, i.e. they belong to a phase of which we don't have visibility: for example, if Aquarius is not installed correctly we don't even get a log on the server, so it becomes difficult to understand a malfunction. Sometimes also new security policies, like Apple's, add random and not repeatable problems. But if we didn't have Aquarius, trying to notarize an installer of a few gigabytes would be a titanic feat, so for the moment, I see this system as the only viable one on our side. Some download errors (e.g. corrupted downloads) instead are constantly monitored: we use many cloud providers, but with this amount of data it's possible to have some problems. With time we are improving the identification of a corrupted archive (Aquarius downloads packages around 50 megabytes) and the resume of the same by an alternative provider. Consider that for a security issue we always try to have HTTPS access and that some old computers often have very old TLS, and are adding complexity to the system.

I wanted to give a warm greeting to all those who thank us for the products; for the others, I wanted to say that we try to satisfy every request, but forgive us if we failed in this. See you soon!

[fmr]

The speech that interests me more is instead the one related to Aquarius, just as a software distribution platform
I try to explain why it has become important, or even necessary, for us. Our products are generally very large, they have an average occupation of a few gigabytes (samples take up a lot of space on disk and also in memory). A classic installer, like the ones we used in the past, would become a real hell for users. In fact, Aquarius acts incrementally, and apart from supporting the downgrade of a product to any previous version (it's a feature we haven't seen yet in any other competitor, I don't know if I'm wrong) it allows our users to download the minimum amount of data at each update.
It's a fantastic tool, and from our point of view, it's the main motivation behind our exponential growth: right now for example we have peak installations of 35 plugins per minute, and I consider it an outstanding result considering the size of our plugin.
.../...
Obviously, every system, no matter how performing or constantly updated, can have problems. We are available to check all these problems if you are interested in solving them, so I suggest you open a ticket.

OK, glad you appeared. Just to clear things: I opened a ticket. Didn't get a response.

Since I raised my voice a bit, you decided it was better to simply deletr my account. Bad attitude, IMO.

It happens the problem I was experienced is related with the password, and because it has special characters (as was referred my some users here). It seems this is an OLD problem, and still unsolved.

So, it's not like you don't know what's happening. Just to clarify, I have nothing against your option of going through a centralize installer, quite the opposite. I am using installers of several other builders, and I'm glad they did it that way. I gave examples. But to use a centralized installer, you have to be sure it works, and don't stands in the way.

Anyway, I gave up about this. I hope you do well, and Merry Christmas to you all. Sorry if I was a little out f my mind before

[Obsolete462444]

Thanks Zaphod for chiming in, sharing your views and of course many thanks for the Freebie present. I'm certain many will enjoy it, especially those with faster computer setups.

Personally I have an older machine (which still works great with less demanding plugins in use) especially since I upgraded to an SSD and upped the RAM) and I also lack the required internet connection on that machine (I use a desktop / tower), so probably not the best potential AA customer / user at the moment.

Still, thanks for the generosity and Merry Christmas.

[GRUMP]

People who worry about a GB of disk space are often those who don't clean up frequently.

[Acustica Community]

We reached 30.000 installations of Cerise in just a couple of days!
Happy Holidays and enjoy!

[MadDogE134]

thnx AA as for a previous post i wouldn't say it is 'substantially' better than Celestial... they are two different animals imo. but i WILL say it is fairly good on cycle demand and sounds pretty amazing. was testing it this morn for the first time and i really like the sound field it gives and it's tweakable on the spread which is nice.

excellent gift

cheers

[Acustica Community]

Cerise update A011 available in Aquarius!!! Compression range expanded | Threshold and input trim fix.

[GRUMP]

We reached 30.000 installations of Cerise in just a couple of days!
Happy Holidays and enjoy!

Thx for mentioning this number and thumbs up

No problems here btw.