Stereo Tool

For those waiting for a Pi 5 image: I expect to have a properly working Pi 5 image tomorrow. (the image itself works now, but some sound cards need a small change in our code as well, which will be part of tonight's build). There were driver issues on HifiBerry's end. They created new drivers in March, which were merged into the Linux kernel in early April. The new image is therefore based on a beta kernel; it may take some time before for these cards in the Pi 5 are officially supported.

This is most likely an issue in the version that you're upgrading *from*. The upload fails. Where did you see that error message? (I'm going to test it here now).

Edit: Oh, never mind- the whole upload/file selection widget is gone.

We have a new Pi 5 image, but it still doesn't work properly. The cause appears to be HifiBerry driver or hardware issues; we're seeing glitches, but not just with Stereo Tool, also with Linux' build-in player aplay. So for now it's probably not really usable. This seems to be triggered by memory usage; MicroMPX does appear to work fine (but I have only briefly tested it). Everything works fine on the Pi 4 with the same image.

In case you do want to test it: https://download.thimeo.com/Thimeo_Pi345.zip

Anyone thought about this: To have a slider for level(volume) the L-R signal only. Will that increase stereo effect?
Let`s say slider from 100 to 120%, like in composite clipper

BETA010 is posted!

Serveral Mac VST improvements.
RDS now supports "Long PS (LPS)" which allows you to transmit PS texts in UTF8 with upto 32 characters, instead of 8 non-UTF8's.
New compressor has a "hold" mode for the dynamic gate.

The dynamic gate could cause the level to get stuck if the input level suddenly dropped a lot. To handle that, we added a "Gate hold", comparable to a "Release hold" - after some time we stop gating. You can set 2 values; the first is for hard gating (not moving at all), the 2nd controls how quickly we start to release after that. Reasonable values that I found so far are 1 second for hard, 2 seconds for releasing.

Hi. Just tested the stereo tool 10.31 Mac vst3 beta on Mac m2pro on Wavelab 11. GUI still coming up blank sadly.

The build that I posted this morning (BETA012) now supports RDS2 in MicroMPX! For now, only the encoder that's integrated in Stereo Tool and the decoder support it, the stand alone encoder does not yet.

Please be aware: We might still change the encoding later so I can't promise that it will stay compatible, but if you get the encoder and decoder from the same build they will be. We're currently using about 12 kbit for the extra RDS2 audio data, and I think it can be done in 7.

Enabling RDS2 in the encoder (requires version 4) will break older decoders (they won't be able to decode anything at all). Without enabling RDS2 there's no change, and all versions are compatible.

The CPU usage with RDS2 enabled is quite a bit higher; we have a way to fix that but we probably won't do it until we need to. It runs on a Pi 2 so it's not extremely high, but it's about 10% higher than the CPU usage from a few months ago, which may be too high for certain hardware. (Without RDS2 the CPU usage of the decoder is actually slightly lower now, 2% or so. MicroMPX+ is also optimized more than before.).

I have just uploaded BETA013.

Important: In this version, the window sizing/placement code has been rewritten from scratch, to hopefully fix all the VST issues. But it's completely new code, so things may have broken. (They should be much easier to fix now than before though).

The Mac libStereoTool library build has failed. and with that the WatchCat build.

Howsabout a little more of that sweet, sweet perfect declipper plugin (DSP & VST) action, please, Mr. Hans, sir? With all the goodies back like noise reduction, Azimuth Correction, and the meters that went missing? Pretty Please??

_________________
America's Country
Three Decades of Country!

I’ve been having issues with the VST Mac version in the last couple of betas. The window doesn’t seem to refresh (including reacting to mouse-pointer selections) until being moved on the screen. This is using Ableton Live on an M2 Ultra Mac Studio, Mac OS Ventura 13.6.

The 10.30 Stereo Tool release works “okay”, but has some weird window-drawing behavior. Also has the annoying habit of always opening the plugin window when opening an Ableton Live session that includes an instance of Stereo Tool.