Dust Equalizer

[Nielzie]

Ive just discovered this and Abstract Chamber which is an excellent reverb-its amazing thank you for this work..

+1

Just discovered these very recently. Great plugins! Among the best in the freeware category imho

[DuX]

I have great appreciation for your work mystran. Thank you so much!

Is there any way the fans could get a form of notification when/if you update any of your plugins?

[mystran]

I have great appreciation for your work mystran. Thank you so much!

Is there any way the fans could get a form of notification when/if you update any of your plugins?

I believe KVR can do that for you if you "watch this" at http://www.kvraudio.com/developer/signaldust

[DuX]

Yeah, I forgot. Thank you!

I'm a subscribed fan now.

[mystran]

For those feeling adventurous.. http://www.signaldust.com/files/eq-beta.zip is a (32-bit only for now, sorry) beta-build which should be stable enough for some real use. The features are the same, but I rewrote basically everything in the audio path.

So the difference is that this version gets rid of the (minimum-phase) oversampling, in favor of a better "corrector" filter. There's now 16 samples latency (figured that'd be reasonable compromise), but in exchange both the amplitude and phase responses should be somewhat nicer. It's possible I'll tweak it further, and right now the CPU hit for changing parameters is a bit high (something I need to optimize), but feel free to try it, and let me hear what you think?

[sunny_j]

but in exchange both the amplitude and phase responses should be somewhat nicer.

Why is there phase cramp near nyquist? I thought you said it was oversampled !

Regards,

[mystran]

but in exchange both the amplitude and phase responses should be somewhat nicer.

Why is there phase cramp near nyquist? I thought you said it was oversampled !

The older versions (including last "stable" for the normal download) used minimum-phase oversampling, so there would be excess delay at the high frequencies, because of the oversampling filter. Also oversampling is always "hopefully improves" type of process... but really the big problem was the oversampling filter itself.

In fact the first thing I did (when I wanted to improve it) was to switch to linear-phase oversampling. But there are several problems with that (high quality requires high latency) and I wanted to do better..

So instead I fit a corrector filter directly. Now it's possible to optimize that fit to an actual target (rather than simply hope for improvement), but because of the Nyquist phase restrictions, the basic problem remained: high quality at high frequencies required a high-order filter -> lots of latency...

Fortunately one can let the latency "float" around a bit (within a range of +/- 1 samples basically), to get either 0 or 180 degrees at Nyquist exactly.. which then makes it pretty easy to fit a low-order corrector that can do a good job.. but doesn't introduce phase-distortion, because we're just adding linear-phase delay.. and this is what the beta tries to do. I'd love to hear comments on how it sounds/feels.

In other words, Muhammad didn't want to go to the mountain, so I moved the mountain for him... please let me know if it blocks your view.

[tongsong]

Thank You very much for Your plugins, the EQ is great and abstract chamber is supverb!

[Halma]

... but feel free to try it, and let me hear what you think?

My oldschool rig: xp sp3, Reaper 4.402, Intel DualCore @ 2.5GHz, 2MB ram, Audigy 2 ZS with kx Project drivers @ 44.1 24bit

one instance on masterbus: approx 0,6% cpu / between +0,5%-1,5% while parameter changing

Sound & knob behaviour (thx for the dbl clk rst): well, tbh I always loved the behavior of the old one because it was so easy to get a nice sound out of it pretty fast. I have dialed in a lot of q values on a lot of eqs and this one acts so smooth. From narrow to wide. So easy.

Does it sound different? Tbh I don't hear that much different on my setup right now. Finally if it doesn't sound worse everything is fine. Because it already sounded great.

Btw my fav parameters: the mid bell section and the lc/hc section. Top notch. Don't get me wrong, the rest is great too but those three parameters are the reason why I always choose the DustEQ as a single bus eq first when I need something gently cut or boosted in that freq spectrum.

Beside the lc/hc filters which I use for cleaning up the bottom and top everything else is used in a "creative" non surgical way. I need color. From subtle to *BÄM*.

Regards
Sebastian

[Kingston]

Here's hoping for a 64bit build. I'd gladly put it through its phases (haha?).

Suggesting a simultaneous build batch for all your binary-types (32bit/64bit/debug variants). That's what I do with any current projects, VST or not, regardless of platform. Always improves project quality to think about all the targets at once. You probably knew this already.

[mystran]

Here's hoping for a 64bit build. I'd gladly put it through its phases (haha?).

Suggesting a simultaneous build batch for all your binary-types (32bit/64bit/debug variants). That's what I do with any current projects, VST or not, regardless of platform. Always improves project quality to think about all the targets at once. You probably knew this already.

I do batch builds normally.. but doing a clean batch build (and especially manually checking that the resulting binaries are working correctly) still takes some time. Not a whole lot of time... but I was simply feeling lazy.

Anyway, I'll need rewrite some of the "fancy math" using faster (and in a few cases slightly more numerically stable) versions.. that won't take too long, so probably in no more than few days (could be today, could be tomorrow).

edit: also I normally do slightly more throughout testing with 64-builds, because I don't use those myself.. so I don't end up "dogfood testing" them during development the same way I end up abusing the 32-bit versions..

edit2: about 99% everything that comes out of the batch build works perfectly fine.. but I've seen it happen that this is not the case.. hence the basic sanity checking round on the specific files produced..

[mystran]

... but feel free to try it, and let me hear what you think?

My oldschool rig: xp sp3, Reaper 4.402, Intel DualCore @ 2.5GHz, 2MB ram, Audigy 2 ZS with kx Project drivers @ 44.1 24bit

one instance on masterbus: approx 0,6% cpu / between +0,5%-1,5% while parameter changing

Yeah well, the parameter changing doesn't average that much, because it's more of a "spiky" process... so the danger of drop-outs is kinda higher than what a CPU meter would directly indicate. Also.. there are CPUs slower than yours.

Sound & knob behaviour (thx for the dbl clk rst): well, tbh I always loved the behavior of the old one because it was so easy to get a nice sound out of it pretty fast. I have dialed in a lot of q values on a lot of eqs and this one acts so smooth. From narrow to wide. So easy.

There's actually two ways to reset a knob (in all my plugins): if you double click, it'll reset to "default" (and you can save your own defaults if you want.. click the "signaldust" logo to get a menu for saving current settings as the defaults.. saves current bank of presets as the default presets too).

You can also press mouse2 while dragging (with mouse1) which will release the drag and reset knob to the center position (the half-point of the full "rotation"). This even works in very old versions that didn't have the double-click default reset yet.

Anyway, thanks for rest of your comments too.

[mystran]

Oh seems there's a bug in the "eq-beta" version, namely "output" gain is active even when set to bypass. This is unintentional.

[DuX]

Well, your already great track EQ just got better. Thank you, mystran! It sounds a bit smoother, yup, especially in the highs [shelving]. It might preserve the transients better now due to linear phase OS?

On my PC it uses only really marginally more CPU [like 0.1%], but yes - it uses a bit more when changing the parameters. 16 samples of latency? It's absolutely OK with me when the benefits are worth it.

I'm going to use it instead of the earlier version and see how it goes. Great work, mystran, as all of your plugs are.

p.s. eagerly awaiting the new build.

[mystran]

Well, your already great track EQ just got better. Thank you, mystran! It sounds a bit smoother, yup, especially in the highs [shelving]. It might preserve the transients better now due to linear phase OS?

No oversampling of any type anymore. The whole point is to do bunch of "fancy math" on the fly to try to get results that are better than what you could get with oversampling with comparative latency.

The small latency is simply because I want to match analog phase. To get this to work, it's necessary to have a bit of delay, so we can deal with the phase and magnitude separately.

edit: I'm trying to fix some small (old) GUI issues, and possibly fine-tune the fit a tiny bit more.. but this shouldn't take more than another day or two..