Product Reviews by KVR Members

"Click Add to cart button. Get your free and fully functional Belle Filter plug-in."

This plugin is not free (48€), it is free with a purchase of another plugin. That isn't free.

Very cool thing is that. A video game plugin in the DAW for times when you need a break from producing or should pause from mixing to get back some subjective hearing. It also is a Rompler for Retro video game sounds for one octave below the playable note area. So you can use 12 unique game sounds for sound design and your projects.

Pros:

- Playable with mouse or MIDI notes.
- You can play against the computer or another player (that is possible due to you move the top and bottom lines by C and D notes, player 1 is one octave below player 2, with a decent MIDI routing you can set up a nice game for both, yikes!).

- 3 different levels playable (Easy, Medium and Lunatic - yeah you guess where this is coming from).

- You can use it as VSTi Rompler for 12 arcade game sounds.

- very good arcade game feeling.

- Available in VST2, VST3 and AAX; 32- and 64-bit.

- Despite not being resizable (at least not in the VST2 version I tested), GUI is fairly big enough to handle the game.

Cons:

- Handling with MIDI notes is sometimes a bit laggy or does not work (At least at my tests with VST2 in Live 9). The binding to game are overridden my the mouse although not active in GUI anymore.

- They want your email-address to send the activation code.

- Initiate the game for the first time after opening your DAW and putting in a MIDI/Instrument track takes quite some time (about a minute).

- Finding the plugin one the webpage is a little tricky. Developer imposes their flagship product.

But the cons don't do much to my opinion. I simply love it. Great.
P.S. You can also make a donation on developer's website (but it needs to be least 5$).

Nice analog compressor, looks and sounds good (very clean and transparent) and also offers simplified parallel compression with its "Dry/Wet" knob. Only has fixed Attack (0.1, 0.3, 1, 3, 10, 30), Release (0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1.6) and Ratio (2/1, 4/1, 8/1) values, so it might not be something for everyone.

It has a small and barely visibile gain reduction meter to the left side, but at least it got one. The plugin is IMHO beside the fact of not being resizable not too big and not too small for modern desktops. I like the horizontal space it occupies on my screen and fits with that maybe in a good spot, where other plugins wouldn't be that good. Especially when you have several GUI of plugins loaded, this could be efficient.

There is also a pre-amp lever on the right side, which to be honest, I can only hear a very subtle difference with which seems to glue the signal more together. I like it but it is very subtle. Maybe it just works belong to knob, but I'll try to find it out in the future. The manual does not say much about.

Speaking about the manual, you can download one at the TAN page in the "Aquarius" installer but it's really made in rough style despite giving you some decent numbers. Probably the roughest manual I've ever seen for a plugin. It's intended to look like that obviously.

Downside is clearly the installation process, which probably is also the reason why this compressor isn't more popular.

You have to create an Acustica Audio account and install the "Aquarius" installer suite from Acustica Audio to get it to your computer. But that's not the only problem. You only can find plugins inside of the "Aquarius" app by a search bar, which works bad. Sometimes it encounters what you want, other times it presents you something else or it just works very laggy.

Acustica Audio itself states at their website regarding the app, "Having a reliable fast internet connection is mandatory." - Another thumbs down from me for that at this point.

Having found the plugin, you can choose whether to install in VST2, VST3 or AAX in 64-bit to a specified location. I wanted the VST2 version (since my Ableton Live 9.7 does not have VST3 support), but interestingly Live couldn't recognise it. So I decided to install the VST3 and bridge it with vst3shell, that did work and so I use the plugin in this way.

Another thing ist that you actually get 2 plugins, TAN and TANZL (which probably stands for TANZeroLatency). I tried TAN it is gives me (52.2 ms, 2459 samples) latency. That is way too much for my use of it. I guess this is also why they created TANZL, with whom I get (2.8 ms, 132 samples) latency, which is fine.

So, if you dare to pass over the stoney path of installing that plugin properly, I highly recommend you to only use the TANZL version.

CPU usage: TAN 5-6%, TANZL 6% (quite much for both in comparison to other competitive plugins)

I won't give it 3 stars, because I actually quite like using TANZL for its clean sound, space and feeling.

Only available in VST3 Format. Which wouldn't be that bad if: I tried to bridge it with vst3shell to use it in Live 9.7 which does not have VST3 support. But I still can't get the GUI to load, which is unusual. Every other .vst's I bridge in this way work seamless. So STFU seems to have however a unique build interface which is not compatible with every system. I saw a review of another Live user having similar issues regarding the STFU plugin to work in Live. So it could be just Live having trouble with this plugin, but it could also be something in the plugin itself.

I do not understand why so many developer nowadays only produce VST3's and let us having not exactly "up-to-dated" DAWs down. Of course, it's the new and better standard, but please always consider that not everyone uses software which is only 2 years old. :-(

I really loved the idea of using the plugin, but that is a real deal breaker. Sorry.

Disclaimer: I've tested RoughRider vers. 1 & 3 (the latest version).

Not a usual compressor, because it adds distortion. Sometimes the sound of the effect reminds me on a transient shaper. You can not use it on every signal, but I really like this one for it's "rough" flavor. Can bring many things to live. For the reason that someone might say it distorts too much, I would refer to take a look at the plugin's and developer's name. This company is not known for clean effects, and that's perfect.

Vers. 2 is not available anymore, but since the developer made many of its plugins legacy in spring 2022, you can get vers. 1 and the "Pro" (3-band multiband) version (both as well in 64-bit) of it for free, too. Very nice addition because they not only have difference in features but also the sound, so you might even prefer vers. 1 over vers. 3 in some cases.

Vers. 3 is the latest and still developed plugin, which has many new features like dedicated knobs for input & output level, a Sidechain high-pass filter, which you even can feed by external input, and a resizable GUI even in the VST 2 version.

Only downside is that you don't have a numerical input for parameter values. That means you need to click and drag to set the parameters, but that is not a big dealbreaker for me.

I can recommend this plugin for everyone who is looking for a more "kick-a$$" compression than you will get on clean and transparent compressors.

Noize Retro is not a free plugin. It costs about 30$ at an external store. Not available at developer's website.

A plugin I've always been looking for. I have tried other wave analyzer plugins before, but they didn't work well on my system (either were too old or unstable).

A feature I never saw before is the option to monitor waveforms for both stereo channels at the same time. Very cool if you use spatial effects to the how the effect affects each channel.

Also available in VST2, not only VST3, which is nice since not all latest DAWs support VST3, for example Live 9.7 which I work with, doesn't.

The feature to resize the GUI in VST2 is very good as well.

Con: I appreciate the 4 different colorized themes but I really would love it if the developer could implement a dark background theme option. Better for the eyes, since I use dark theme in my DAW.

Also I would like to have a parameter to adjust the thickness of the waveform.

That's also the reason why only give 4 stars instead of 5, but if they could enhance that, it would be an absolutely great tool for me.

This seems pretty interesting. the ability to just chose a reverb preset without falling into much concerns about tweaking its parameters and thereby lose your idea or other creativity is a genius strike. i definitely want to try this out.

This one is curious, and i like curious things. Maybe you don't need this plugin at every session you have, but it is a really good metering plugin if you want to listen/analyze to specific frequency areas and (for what i think which is even more cool) you can listen to specific frequency bands at each of both stereo channels (L+R) as well as at the Mid or Side Signal alone.

F.e. if i would want to listen to the low end at the side or the mids or the left side, its very fast to made with Isol8.

You can use it also as an EQ/Filter, but its behaviour on the signal is very harsh as there is no gain or resonance function for the frequency bands, but if you like such rough filtering this is a good option too.

You also can put another Filter after if you want to make a little boost or cut of those frequency areas.

Towards this you can also filter certain frequency areas out to treat them after separately from the other.

Isol8 can work as an spatial effect as well. You can make certain frequency areas to summed mono or mono by copying the left or right side to the opposite side with the Monitor Center function by clicking on the "Monitor" text.

The Dim-Option for me is a little bit uneven. There is a little attack time until it drops the audio down the entered value in dB. Here i would wish that there is a switch as like the Bypass Filter switch, on where we can toggle between gliding volume drop and direct volume drop. But it is good as well.

The Filter Bypass-switch is a very good idea too.

I really like the 3D-like GUI. Thanks to Crimson Merry.

Very good plugin, i have to say here. It isn't only a Metering/Analyze Tool, it's even got a Spatial/Stereo Width Section; but mostly i use it only for Metering purpose and it is very good at this. Very good, Can't believe that this is a free one, thanks iZotope! This really made me hungry of the whole Ozone Station.