frei:raum - Magic EQ?

[plexuss]

Indeed! And often at a high cpu cost. But I would never separate from my FabFilters, Zynaptiqs or Sonible frei:raum, for that matter, as the creativity they bring to my table is just so musical, I consider them instruments in their own right. That’s how high my praise reaches.

Off topic, outside of the GUI, I find FabFilter to be run-of-the-mill but on the high quality side. I don't think FabFilter doesn anything astounding with their plugins, save for the decay EQ in Pro-R. I do enjoy my FF plugins but they are pretty straightforward. On the other hand, for things like compressors, EQ, gates, de-essers etc, check out Eiosis or DMG - their products push those run-of-the-mill tools into the realm of futuristic leading edge. FF gets a lot of hype but I think its because their GUIs are futuristic (and high in usability) but they aren't futuristic in terms of features and functions.

[yellowmix]

Sonible got back to me very quickly (I had sent the support request over the weekend), said they'll investigate and get back to me. They confirmed that due to latency compensation the plugin does some buffering but there is no change to the incoming data.

In the meantime I've been running more tests and it's somewhat inconsistent. It does null sometimes (sort of, more on that later). But it more often does not.

There's also an interesting thing happening at the start of the playback. There's a quickly decaying leak before it drops to around -130 db. After a couple seconds, it occasionally nulls for the rest of the playback/render.

So it does seem like some kind of PDC issue. Going to try it on a couple more DAWs and other situations.

[bmanic]

Will have to digest on this a bit. At 60$ it's slightly tempting.. at full retail, that's just nuts and definitely not worth it at all.

... to you.

You think it's worth 300$ ?

There are quite a few plugins you can get for 300$ that combined would probably get you better results in most situations, or at least that is my current estimate of the situation.

Having said that, frei:raum is definitely growing on me. Once I stopped thinking about it as a "mastering" processor (which they market it as) and more of a rather brutal shaping tool, I'm starting to accept and understand what it is capable of (it's not for mastering, for sure).

Still.. 300$ makes it very expensive.

[plexuss]

Will have to digest on this a bit. At 60$ it's slightly tempting.. at full retail, that's just nuts and definitely not worth it at all.

... to you.

You think it's worth 300$ ?

Yes. as I mentioned if I was making a living with music production yes I'd buy it for $350 which is closer to the regular price in USD. Yes I would without hesitation.

[nicksohn]

I'm a little bit confused.
If i want remove unwanted resonances, should i drag up or down the magic band after learning?

[yppse]

up - that is applying the magic curve, freiraum suggests. down is "pushing" the resonances

[nicksohn]

But, I tested it with 1kHz sine wave.
If I drag up the band placed near 1kHz, the signal of 1kHz sine wave rises up.

Like this:
https://imgur.com/a/tVQUn

[yppse]

yeah, but what does it to the frequencies around your 1kHz test tone?

EDIT: the magic-band seems to interpret your sine NOT to be a resonance - why should it?

[Stanoli]

I bought it and for my workflow it is perfect.

Everyday I am working on songs in my studio.
When I finish for the day I export the song to MP3
and transfer it to my laptop where I listen to it in the evening several times on my headphones.

I have a default mastering chain in Cubase and I added frei:raum to it.

So before exporting I go to the frei:raum EQ, click on the three automatic frequencies,
wait 10 seconds and after a little tweaking I have a bettersounding MP3 file for myself.

It`s fun, fast and goodsounding.

I haven`t done any real mastering work with frei:raum yet where I so far use UAD Massive Passive and MassenburgEQ.

[plexuss]

I haven`t done any real mastering work with frei:raum yet where I so far use UAD Massive Passive and MassenburgEQ.

Well... be careful with it because it's not really and EQ. The Smart EQ is and does the usual attempted resonance filtering thing. However that may not be needed on a track if its mixed well so Smart EQ will have limited use for mastering unless your tracks need to be cleaned up. I suppose this could be useful for those mastering a stereo pre-master stem from a client that provides a poor mix. but if you do your own mixing, its best to get the pre-master free of unintended resonances at the mix stage.

As for Proximity and Entropy, these are really multi-band transient processors and again, the pre-master may not need this. In a mastering application these are good for adjusting the nature of the transients in a multi-band sense. but again this is best handled at the mix stage.

So frei:raum would be a useful mastering tool for 3rd party pre-masters that need to be repaired but all this is better handled at the mixing stage. I think of frei:raum more as a mixing tool than a mastering tool but for repairing crappy pre-masters where you cant go back to the mix it could be used for that too but just becareful because its a heavy hitter.

[Stanoli]

I haven`t done any real mastering work with frei:raum yet where I so far use UAD Massive Passive and MassenburgEQ.

Well... be careful with it because it's not really and EQ. The Smart EQ is and does the usual attempted resonance filtering thing. However that may not be needed on a track if its mixed well so Smart EQ will have limited use for mastering unless your tracks need to be cleaned up. I suppose this could be useful for those mastering a stereo pre-master stem from a client that provides a poor mix. but if you do your own mixing, its best to get the pre-master free of unintended resonances at the mix stage.

As for Proximity and Entropy, these are really multi-band transient processors and again, the pre-master may not need this. In a mastering application these are good for adjusting the nature of the transients in a multi-band sense. but again this is best handled at the mix stage.

So frei:raum would be a useful mastering tool for 3rd party pre-masters that need to be repaired but all this is better handled at the mixing stage. I think of frei:raum more as a mixing tool than a mastering tool but for repairing crappy pre-masters where you cant go back to the mix it could be used for that too but just becareful because its a heavy hitter.

I just wanted to say that there is also good use for frei:raum outside the "serious professional mastering".
For 60$ I bought it and was amazed how good it sounded for detecting the freqency automatically.
And it is a lot of fun.

I am looking foreward to the next few years, when the algorithms get better and DAWs will have built-in automatic-detecting mastering function.

I think that`s the next step in audiotechnology. That`s at least the feeling that I get when using frei:raum.

[plexuss]

I think that`s the next step in audiotechnology. That`s at least the feeling that I get when using frei:raum.

I agree. I think frei:raum offers some very interesting and good sounding approaches to working with audio. In fact I had fantisized about tools that separate aspects of audio that are these days a-typical. although one could argue frei:raum is mostly a transient tool, I think it does transients in a different way than other transient processors: splitting the sense of direct vs space and atonal vs tonal is pretty unique and powerful.

[Caine123]

I haven`t done any real mastering work with frei:raum yet where I so far use UAD Massive Passive and MassenburgEQ.

Well... be careful with it because it's not really and EQ. The Smart EQ is and does the usual attempted resonance filtering thing. However that may not be needed on a track if its mixed well so Smart EQ will have limited use for mastering unless your tracks need to be cleaned up. I suppose this could be useful for those mastering a stereo pre-master stem from a client that provides a poor mix. but if you do your own mixing, its best to get the pre-master free of unintended resonances at the mix stage.

As for Proximity and Entropy, these are really multi-band transient processors and again, the pre-master may not need this. In a mastering application these are good for adjusting the nature of the transients in a multi-band sense. but again this is best handled at the mix stage.

So frei:raum would be a useful mastering tool for 3rd party pre-masters that need to be repaired but all this is better handled at the mixing stage. I think of frei:raum more as a mixing tool than a mastering tool but for repairing crappy pre-masters where you cant go back to the mix it could be used for that too but just becareful because its a heavy hitter.

I agree. But even on 2 mixes i thought are great the slight add of freiraum sounds nicer

[Stanoli]

I haven`t done any real mastering work with frei:raum yet where I so far use UAD Massive Passive and MassenburgEQ.

Well... be careful with it because it's not really and EQ. The Smart EQ is and does the usual attempted resonance filtering thing. However that may not be needed on a track if its mixed well so Smart EQ will have limited use for mastering unless your tracks need to be cleaned up. I suppose this could be useful for those mastering a stereo pre-master stem from a client that provides a poor mix. but if you do your own mixing, its best to get the pre-master free of unintended resonances at the mix stage.

As for Proximity and Entropy, these are really multi-band transient processors and again, the pre-master may not need this. In a mastering application these are good for adjusting the nature of the transients in a multi-band sense. but again this is best handled at the mix stage.

So frei:raum would be a useful mastering tool for 3rd party pre-masters that need to be repaired but all this is better handled at the mixing stage. I think of frei:raum more as a mixing tool than a mastering tool but for repairing crappy pre-masters where you cant go back to the mix it could be used for that too but just becareful because its a heavy hitter.

I agree. But even on 2 mixes i thought are great the slight add of freiraum sounds nicer

There you go.
May`be you can obtain better results with other EQs, but for a fast automatic polishing of a mix, it is unbeatable.
I did not think such a good sonic result could be obtainable with an automatic EQ.
Great times we live in.

niceeeeeerrrrrrrr, yes

[Julien Unison]

Hello to everyone.

I just bought frei:raum to use it in Logic Pro X, and I can't see any preset in it.

Is it normal ?

Julien