Soundtoys Echoboy

[budweiser]

Only downsides to echoboy are its tiny gui (yeah, i know...) and its drop down "style" menu. A contrario the sound is fantastic and offer endless possibilities.

[dreamvoid]

To put it another way dreamvoid, what exactly do you find unfunctional about this?

- dark on dark or even black on black (knobs)
- unsharp, small fonts
- exaggerated skeuomorphism, 'screws' are nearly as 'big' as some knobs, idiotic 'wood' frames
- tiny, dark displays of important parameters
- brighter text of logo and plug in name
- general tininess of elements

I'm not a laptop user, I have a studio and when I work at my main place there are five screens around me and I watch my screens from a distance quite often using many plug ins at once.
"Functional" is something else ... Valhalla, Acon, FabFilter, DMG, TAL, etc. and even D16 with larger GUI and newer Sonnox are quite functional designs.

[wagtunes]

Only downsides to echoboy are its tiny gui (yeah, i know...) and its drop down "style" menu. A contrario the sound is fantastic and offer endless possibilities.

Wait a minute. Just how tiny is this GUI? Because that is a big bugaboo for me and has stopped me from getting a number of plugins.

Are we talking M1 and Wavestation tiny?

[robotmonkey]

Are we talking M1 and Wavestation tiny?

Echoboy is not even remotely as bad. Actually it's gui is not that tiny at all, it's quite average.

[wagtunes]

Are we talking M1 and Wavestation tiny?

Echoboy is not even remotely as bad. Actually it's gui is not that tiny at all, it's quite average.

Then what's all this tiny GUI talk? Do people even know what a tiny GUI is?

[dubguy99]

Erm, no, the actual problem is with the sound. Contrary to what many think, it is NOT a tape or analog delay. It was not made to work like one. Ask Mr. Sean Costello or look up his posts on delays here. So with these models you are getting a 'somewhat', a 'thereabouts' analog or tape sound - but nothing like the real thing. It's very easy to mislead people - a frequency curve, some noise, a bit louder or softer levels - and they go 'wow! magic!'.

Uhh, this is what he actually said:

"EchoBoy is definitely the one to aspire to. That plugin is over 10 years old, and is still all kinds of awesome. The SoundToys folks do so many things RIGHT.

The one aspect I don't hear in EchoBoy is replicating the behavior of the older delays. The sound is amazing in EchoBoy, but when you switch to the Echoplex mode, it doesn't change the delay time in the weird way that you hear in an Echoplex (which is completely different than how a Space Echo responds when changing the delay time). "

viewtopic.php?f=146&t=470762&start=15

[dark water]

To put it another way dreamvoid, what exactly do you find unfunctional about this?

- dark on dark or even black on black (knobs)
- unsharp, small fonts
- exaggerated skeuomorphism, 'screws' are nearly as 'big' as some knobs, idiotic 'wood' frames
- tiny, dark displays of important parameters
- brighter text of logo and plug in name
- general tininess of elements

I'm not a laptop user, I have a studio and when I work at my main place there are five screens around me and I watch my screens from a distance quite often using many plug ins at once.
"Functional" is something else ... Valhalla, Acon, FabFilter, DMG, TAL, etc. and even D16 with larger GUI and newer Sonnox are quite functional designs.

To be fair, if you'd written that in your first post on the previous page, there wouldn't have been any argument, as it would have been judged within your own context.

There's no justification for your rudeness however - neither about the developers who you want to 'slap', their 'crap' product in your eyes, or about my ability to understand the word 'functional'.

Whilst I disagree with a couple of your criticisms of the GUI, given your and my different contexts for using this plugin, I do agree with the wish for the developers to ditch the pointless screws and for the GUI to be larger.
However, for my purposes on this typical (1920 x 1080) laptop of mine, the design of the GUI is easily clear and functional enough to use in any music projects.

@Wagtunes, it's not tiny, but tbh I think you may find it on the small side for your eyes, given previous comments of yours that I have read about plugin sizes.
To help you judge, this is a full screenshot on my 1920 x 1080 laptop, which shows the size / position of Echoboy in relation to everything else on my 17inch widescreen (roughly 3:2) monitor:

[wagtunes]

To put it another way dreamvoid, what exactly do you find unfunctional about this?

- dark on dark or even black on black (knobs)
- unsharp, small fonts
- exaggerated skeuomorphism, 'screws' are nearly as 'big' as some knobs, idiotic 'wood' frames
- tiny, dark displays of important parameters
- brighter text of logo and plug in name
- general tininess of elements

I'm not a laptop user, I have a studio and when I work at my main place there are five screens around me and I watch my screens from a distance quite often using many plug ins at once.
"Functional" is something else ... Valhalla, Acon, FabFilter, DMG, TAL, etc. and even D16 with larger GUI and newer Sonnox are quite functional designs.

To be fair, if you'd written that in your first post on the previous page, there wouldn't have been any argument, as it would have been judged within your own context.

There's no justification for your rudeness however - neither about the developers who you want to 'slap', their 'crap' product in your eyes, or about my ability to understand the word 'functional'.

Whilst I disagree with a couple of your criticisms of the GUI, given your and my different contexts for using this plugin, I do agree with the wish for the developers to ditch the pointless screws and for the GUI to be larger.
However, for my purposes on this typical (1920 x 1080) laptop of mine, the design of the GUI is easily clear and functional enough to use in any music projects.

@Wagtunes, it's not tiny, but tbh I think you may find it on the small side for your eyes, given previous comments of yours that I have read about plugin sizes.
To help you judge, this is a full screenshot on my 1920 x 1080 laptop, which shows the size / position of Echoboy in relation to everything else on my 17inch widescreen (roughly 3:2) monitor:

Well, I'm working in 1280 so it may not be that bad. But yes, at that resolution it's unusable.

I guess I'll download the demo and find out.

[wagtunes]

Okay, I downloaded the demo. FX plugins don't give me the same problem as synths because they're not as busy. These are essentially the same size as the stock Cubase plugins. They're perfectly fine because there are very few controls relative to a synth. So no problem using these.

I get 30 days to try all this stuff out. The Echoboy on Softube sounds freaking off the charts amazing. I should probably post a short clip.

[dreamvoid]

There's no justification for your rudeness however - neither about the developers who you want to 'slap', their 'crap' product in your eyes, or about my ability to understand the word 'functional'.

I like to express myself clear and I come from a German area where clear words are a form of respect. This form of humorous appreciation may not come across in a forum. And I didn't say the product is crap, I use it quite often, the GUI is crap. I wouldn't bother if I had no intention to use this damn thing for its sound quality.

[budweiser]

Echoboy is not even remotely as bad. Actually it's gui is not that tiny at all, it's quite average.

For a tweaker's delight like echoboy, i'm not against a bit more average

[m03]

- dark on dark or even black on black (knobs)

That's a feature, not a bug. The tick marks are still white and highly visible. Beyond that, a precise value can be read for each control by right-clicking etc.

"Functional" is something else ...
Valhalla
...are quite functional designs.

Oof. This underscores why a lot of this is all personal preference. I've personally found Valhalla interfaces to put too much emphasis on rarely-used parameters (sometimes at the expense of hiding more-likely-to-be-useful-parameters), and the overall appearance to be ugly and painful to look at. Ubermod being a prime example.

[dark water]

There's no justification for your rudeness however - neither about the developers who you want to 'slap', their 'crap' product in your eyes, or about my ability to understand the word 'functional'.

I like to express myself clear and I come from a German area where clear words are a form of respect. This form of humorous appreciation may not come across in a forum. And I didn't say the product is crap, I use it quite often, the GUI is crap. I wouldn't bother if I had no intention to use this damn thing for its sound quality.

There's nothing at all respectful about your comments regarding Soundtoys or Echoboy in these past two pages.
You just sound like an immature and aggressive person who tries, and fails, to justify his rude outbursts.

No doubt you'll find it just as humorous if someone gives you, or one of your family members, a 'slap' in the future...

@wagtunes - it'll be interesting to hear one of your soundclips (as I like many of your fun synth ideas). Cheers.

[T-CM11]

I like to express myself clear and I come from a German area where clear words are a form of respect.

I come from a nondisclosed area where farting in your general direction is a form of respect. DON'T YOU JUDGE ME!!

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Oof. This underscores why a lot of this is all personal preference. I've personally found Valhalla interfaces to put too much emphasis on rarely-used parameters (sometimes at the expense of hiding more-likely-to-be-useful-parameters), and the overall appearance to be ugly and painful to look at. Ubermod being a prime example.

Regardless of what parameters they chose to display or the "overall appearance being ugly," which are opinions, the Valhalla GUI's are easy to see/read. I think that part is hard to dispute. They are 1) resizable, 2) have very readable fonts, 3) knob and fader positions are legible at distances, and 4) there's sufficient contrast throughout. At first I thought the Valhalla UI's looked like children toys or something, but after years with them, they're among my absolute favorite because they're just easy to work with due to how clearly legible everything is.

If you don't have great eyesight, or the right lighting conditions, or the right-size monitor or resolution, Echoboy can be difficult to work with because it's hard to see thinks like knobs and their values by quickly glancing at the GUI. I have 20/20 vision but still find that Echoboy requires a little bit more effort to get a handle on the parameter values due to small UI elements and lack of overall contrast. Echoboy Jr. is much better in this regard. I think even Soundtoys recognizes this, hence why they changed the look for Echoboy Jr.

My guess is that Echoboy and some of the older SoundToys plugins will get GUI updates before we see a SoundToys v6. I have nothing to base that on other than Echoboy Jr. having a different look, but it just seems like an obvious update to some of those older plugins. Remember, when those plugins were designed, screen resolutions were in a very different place than they are today. There was no such thing as UHD monitors. Echoboy would be completely useless to me in Studio One (which doesn't scale plugin GUI's) if I had my laptop set to it's native 4k resolution. 4k monitors wouldn't have even been a consideration when it was originally designed.