Monitoring Plugin Development

[aetmont]

Hey all,

Through honing my skills, I'm finding that I'm in pursuit of a plugin to consolidate my monitoring habits without a behemoth in MeldaProduction's MXXX, but I have absolutely zero development skills. My question is whether what I'm after is something I could jury rig with some copy-pasted Airwindows code and Juce, or if I'd really need to hire someone to do this properly without derailing my life in pursuit of this. I'd like several parameters that I could map to a MIDI controller:

- Bypass
- Gain in
- Toggle: Mono/Stereo
- Toggle on/off : HP@200 LP@600 (A single on-off of the two filters being both on at once, not toggling between them)
- 5-band multiband with band-solo function to hone in on certain areas, movable crossover.
- Safety Clipper at 0.0 dbfs
- Gain Out

Thank you for your time, attention, and patience with my question!

[Ardura]

Seems like you could do this with an EQ and mapping MIDI controls to that in a DAW, is there some part you can't do that way?

It's definitely doable though as it's own plugin, just stuff like the 5 band soloing might be a little tricky or need a GUI which none of the airwindows plugins have so that's a hurdle as well.

[gambero]

Definitely doable with a bit of research, especially for the crossover part.
Blue Cat's Plug'n Script might be one of the fastest ways to achieve what you're looking for, without many headaches. I've done similar things with REAPER's JS.

[kerfuffle]

I have a simple plug-in like this that I use during development, except for the multiband. I'm planning to open source it but have not done this yet because of lack of time. Soon (maybe).

[mystran]

- Safety Clipper at 0.0 dbfs

A limiter is better choice.. perhaps even one that drops gain a whole lot more than necessary when the threshold is exceeded... and it should also be tested to make sure it can handle infinities and NaNs in it's input gracefully. I don't like a safety limiter that mutes completely, but that's also an option (or a combination.. like limiting the first 20dB of overs and then adding a mute if we go past that).

One reason a clipper is less than idea is that if you have an algorithm blow up, it's the full-scale squarewaves you want to avoid sending to the speakers/headphones.. yet that's exactly what a clipper produces when presented with exceeding loud input. A limiter meanwhile will try to bring it down to something sane without distorting the signal, which often works out better for the ears.

Another advantage of a limiter is also that it's better at alerting you to random issues.. like say your algorithm is occasionally producing isolated peaks of very large amplitude.. with a clipper these might go unnoticed until you look at the max peak reading (perhaps much later) and then you have no idea what you were doing when the issue presented itself. With a limiter that brings the gain down on the first such peak and then only slowly releases it back up, you're basically guaranteed to know about the problem immediately.

Personally though, I prefer to keep the safety limiter simple (with some metering, but that's it) and then add any fancier stuff to a separate plugin.. 'cos this way you can put the safety limiter into a project template, have it always sit there on the master and mostly just forget about it until it's actually needed.