IKM 5 plug-ins of your choice, what are the best for you?

[jens]

I do like Fame. It's not "THE" Muscle Shoals Sound Studio that first made that tiny Alabama town famous

It totally is - the other one was founded much later by key Fame session musos (and relocated ten years after that)... so you got it completely backwards actually.

doah! Yeap. Thanks for the correction! That's the problem with having 2 huge studios in one tiny town. It's confusing.

Now we're going to need a Muscle Shoals Sound Studio set then to complete the set.

Well, to make matters even a tad more complicated, actually "Muscle Shoals Sound Studio" wasn't even in Muscle Shoals but instead a few miles down the road in Sheffield. Now - after it relocated in '79 - it's still in Sheffield.

[jens]

For me it's exactly the opposite way around. Fame just doesn't work for me. It has too many weird phasey frequencies all over the place.

Yeh, I get that with "broad" but much less so with "focused"...

edit: I meant (counter-intuitively) "broad" - it's exactly the other way around than what I said earlier...

[bmanic]

Hmm, never had tried the Space Echo from IK. I have to say, it is rather nice.

[zerocrossing]

Hmm, never had tried the Space Echo from IK. I have to say, it is rather nice.

Their Tape Delay is quite good too. Actually, I find most of their plugins to be pretty high quality. If you wait for a group buy, you can usually get them for peanuts. I just got Amplitube Max from someone for $75.

[briefcasemanx]

I don't know what it is about Amplitude but I just don't get it. People keeps saying it's fine but to my ears there is something wrong with the overall sound of it.. like there is some kind of weakness/edge to it that just sounds bad. It almost sounds to me like the whole thing is some kind of "wrapper" that has a bad built in oversampling from input to output.

It's possible that I'm heavily affected by the visual placebo or something but ever since amplitube 2 (the first version I had) I've felt it's just "wrong" somehow. Very strange as I don't hear this same thing in their other plugins.

I also don't like their AI modeled guitar thing. It's edgy and weak sounding to me. Something is seriously lacking in the critical 1-5kHz region.

Probably it's just me..

I agree. I think it was 2 or 3 a ton of people were saying it was a game changer and I only really liked one of the models (and the overloud amp sim was MUCH better at the time). Then the latest version a bunch of people were talking about how amazing it is and it's difficult for me to find a combinations and settings that sound good. There's a few amps that are okay, I think I liked one of the Marshalls after heavily tweaking and adding pedals, but I just don't get it.

I think a couple of the plugin alliance amps sound better, and I'm not over the moon about any of those.

[Samuel Wood]

Hey finding the perfect guitar tone is subjective, and amp simulations can vary in quality. It may take time and experimentation to find the right combination of settings and plugins that suit your preferences.

[bmanic]

Anybody know if it is possible to somehow adjust the individual tape head times on the IK Space Delay? It says this in the manual:

"HEAD TIME: here it is possible to manually enter the heads’ playback delay in milliseconds, or in note
divisions when SYNC is ON."

.. but I can't click+drag them, nor double click them to get any fields for editing. Would be nice if it was possible.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Anybody know if it is possible to somehow adjust the individual tape head times on the IK Space Delay? It says this in the manual:

"HEAD TIME: here it is possible to manually enter the heads’ playback delay in milliseconds, or in note
divisions when SYNC is ON."

.. but I can't click+drag them, nor double click them to get any fields for editing. Would be nice if it was possible.

They're displays, not actual controls. It's all driven off the Rate knob. In ms mode, it looks like the head-spacing is fixed. But in beat mode, the Rate knob cycles through a long list of values. I agree though, they should be editable rather than just being displays.

[bmanic]

The manual sort of hints that you could edit them manually.. no, it explicitly says so. Oh well, hope it's a feature that gets added. Would be awesome!

[jens]

The manual also mentions a (crucial) output-volume control they forgot to actually implement - it's like the person who wrote the manual had more sense than whoever overlooked the development.

[bmanic]

Agreed. An actual clean output volume control is sorely needed. Can't really use this as an insert if you want to gain stage it clean(ish).

Man.. IK Multimedia is such a weird company. They have the obvious potential and talent of making some great plugins but I keep running into oddities and strange design decisions with their plugins.

Another example is the Manley Vari-Mu emulation. That too could use some serious gain staging rethinking. Internally it's running way too hot and thus if you actually want to make it sound closer to the hardware (the way people use the hardware, me included) you need to gain stage it with much lower incoming levels but there's not enough threshold range and the output gain isn't clean compensation either.

[jens]

Can't really use this as an insert if you want to gain stage it clean(ish).

Can't really use it as an insert full stop.

The "Input" affects both the wet and the dry output level and also the saturation amount. It just doesn*t get any more stupid than that - you basically need to be braindead to come up with such an implementation in the first place, not to mention actually releasing it like that, rather than saying "Gosh, I really messed up this one, didn't I - phew, glad nobody was looking" .
It took me all of two or three minutes of testing the plugin out to think "HOLY CRAP - WHAT THE f**k!!!"

It's beyond comprehension to me how they can sell it like that - plus - what's even more imcomprehensible:

a) it's not like this was released yesterday, so they seem to have no inclination to even fix this

b) lots of folks seem to think it's just fine like that

Just thinking about this gets my brain in a knot.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Wish List for T-Racks 6: all TR6 plugins have a menu with input/output gain controls or a headroom control that changes the internal calibration via a single knob.

[heyheycnv]

I've had Fame and Sunset crash Reaper more than once now. W10. Click to open them in the FX insert strip. Reaper stops responding. 20 seconds later Reaper goes down. Start it back up and Fame/Sunset open back up fine then.
Not sure what's going on but I'm now trying to remember to save progress before I use them.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I've had Fame and Sunset crash Reaper more than once now. W10. Click to open them in the FX insert strip. Reaper stops responding. 20 seconds later Reaper goes down. Start it back up and Fame/Sunset open back up fine then.
Not sure what's going on but I'm now trying to remember to save progress before I use them.

Latest versions of everything? Mac or PC? Which plugin format? I've never had either crash Reaper that I can recall.