Trackspacer - still the king or any alternatives?

[El°HYM]

Soothe 2 with its side chaining function is more precise than trackspacer. It only ducks what is necessary instead of ducking a whole frequency area/band.

+1.
Trackspacer is like a hammer.
Soothe2 is like a scalpel.


However for very transienty material, trackspacer might work better.

If voxengo added external sidechain to soniformer id retire trackspacer.

Sidechain for Soniformer would indeed be a clever new feature. Good Idea!

[MattLeschuck]

Trackspacer here is still king for the most part, mainly because of its zero latency. Soothe 2 is useless in Logic when side chained as the delay compensation isn't adjusted for. Session goes noticeably out of sync since Soothe adds a lot of latency.

That said, Soothe 2 is great for side chain ducking EQ outside of Logic. Works great when im in Pro Tools or Reason.

[HOTF]

Soothe 2 with its side chaining function is more precise than trackspacer. It only ducks what is necessary instead of ducking a whole frequency area/band.

hmmm I don't think you understand how trackspacer works

[Ploki]

Soothe 2 with its side chaining function is more precise than trackspacer. It only ducks what is necessary instead of ducking a whole frequency area/band.

hmmm I don't think you understand how trackspacer works

he does.
Trackspacer has 32 bands and soothe has 1000+ (depending on sharpness and resolution).
One is FFT other is multiband.

That’s why i said trackspacer can be better with transients, gentler phase response.

[SeeingInMidi]

I wrote about this on another page...Trackspacer is good but MSpectralDynamics is superior. In fact, it's far superior to everything mentioned on this page. However, it isn't superior for everything. Soothe does a better job for broad bands but when you turn up the sharpness, it's more of an effect than a practical solution. It's all subjective. Anyway, like I said, I've written about this topic and made an extensive comparison of the plugins at the time. MSD has a smaller version now, which is lighter on the CPU. Still, for ducking harmonics or flattening the spectrum or taming areas, spectrally, my go-to is MSD.

The problem with MspectralDynamics compared to Soothe and Dseq is the amount of pre-ringing it can introduce. Sadly, I have already brought up the issue with Melda but It seems like they won't be able to solve it.

[HOTF]

Soothe 2 with its side chaining function is more precise than trackspacer. It only ducks what is necessary instead of ducking a whole frequency area/band.

hmmm I don't think you understand how trackspacer works

he does.
Trackspacer has 32 bands and soothe has 1000+ (depending on sharpness and resolution).
One is FFT other is multiband.

That’s why i said trackspacer can be better with transients, gentler phase response.

I meant it dosent necessarily duck the whole frequency spectrum you can affect only certain frequency (a region) but re reading his comment I think i misunderstood what he meant.

[MogwaiBoy]

Soothe 2 with its side chaining function is more precise than trackspacer. It only ducks what is necessary instead of ducking a whole frequency area/band.

hmmm I don't think you understand how trackspacer works

he does.
Trackspacer has 32 bands and soothe has 1000+ (depending on sharpness and resolution).
One is FFT other is multiband.

That’s why i said trackspacer can be better with transients, gentler phase response.

I meant it dosent necessarily duck the whole frequency spectrum you can affect only certain frequency (a region) but re reading his comment I think i misunderstood what he meant.

Yes, 1000+ spectral bands is indeed a lot more "precise" than 32 multi-bands (TrackSpacer) - but they can both target only certain ranges.

BTW WavesFactory Spectre is a secret weapon of the highest order. 100% unique and amazing.

[Ploki]

The range of trackspacer is fairly broad. If you feed it a sinewave it will trigger 10 neighbouring bands.

This is not necessarily bad, and as i said due to fixed phase response it can work better than soothe on some material.
But it is very broad.

Love spectre

[kev2525]

If you own Cubase then the Frequency 2 plugin offers up to 8 side chain inputs for dynamic EQ. Its quite flexible and gets great results. It has M/S operation too.

[Lesha]

I wrote about this on another page...Trackspacer is good but MSpectralDynamics is superior. In fact, it's far superior to everything mentioned on this page. However, it isn't superior for everything. Soothe does a better job for broad bands but when you turn up the sharpness, it's more of an effect than a practical solution. It's all subjective. Anyway, like I said, I've written about this topic and made an extensive comparison of the plugins at the time. MSD has a smaller version now, which is lighter on the CPU. Still, for ducking harmonics or flattening the spectrum or taming areas, spectrally, my go-to is MSD.

The problem with MspectralDynamics compared to Soothe and Dseq is the amount of pre-ringing it can introduce. Sadly, I have already brought up the issue with Melda but It seems like they won't be able to solve it.

Thanks for confirming what I heard in the lower frequencies, Trackspacer sounded transparent while MSD sounded funky and changed the lows in a wierd way.

[AdvancedFollower]

32 bands are still plenty. Most dynamic EQ's don't even support that many bands. I know Trackspacer isn't a dynamic EQ and the bands are not comparable, but that would be another option for achieving the same effect using sidechain. For example TDR Nova supports 4 bands (6 in GE). The real strength of Trackspacer is how intuitive and easy it is to set up even for a complete amateur like me. The high/low cut are often all you need to fine-tune the effect. The advanced panel (which it took me embarrassingly long to notice) allows you to tweak the attack/release and a few other parameters to make it even more transparent.

[fren--]

Any update on this for 2024?

[worldfever]

as someone who uses soothe2 a lot, i dont really understand how the sidechain works - will it duck resonant frequencies from your sidechain in the audio you apply it too? and if so, is that really an effective alternative to trackspacer?

[billinder33]

Trackspacer works for me pretty much universally. It may not be the best solution for every possible scenario, but works well enough that I don't typically use anything else unless some edge case arises. I occasionally use Shaperbox for laser-tight, dead-silence ducking between a kick and sub, but 9 times out of 10 Trackspacer is good enough.

I wish it would store presets so I didn't have to dig into the hidden settings to adjust attack and release, but that's a nitpick and there are workarounds in the DAW.

[Dark Fiber]

Shaperbox 3 for broad ducking, smart:comp for spectral ducking.