Stereo Tool

Time for another update. Many changes in this round. I've revised the gate thresholds to make them less aggressive, I have reworked the limiters. Now, both limiter thresholds are identical, but Intellilimit has a slower attack time. This provides about the same amount of total limiting depth, but is more consistent, because Intellilimit will be invoked on all peaks that are high enough to hit the limiter, thus behaving the same for all kinds of peak attacks.

I have also changed several limiter thresholds, eliminated HF EQ and allowed more freedom in the top and bottom band linking. Finally, I upped the overall drive to the clipper.

So overall, things should sound smoother and more consistent (and louder) than before, though possibly less bright.

This preset will work for build 111 and higher.

Yes, Yes and Yes Sometimes you need to hear something to know you don't want it. Extreme settings can allow you to hear how overall action reacts to the extreme setting. I want to hear how your dynamic module (one band) sounds at 0.5 ms attack and 20 ms recovery to get a feel for how it behaves. If you are getting to know the sound characteristics of the subsequent high frequency clipping system, being able to adjust preceding high frequency band dynamic module to unusual attack values gives a sense of how you can hit the high frequency clipper.

Mentioning again, I think a gain structure dashboard would be helpful. To me, input and output I-O digital zero reference level is not really clear in the software. Much of this part is on faith and hope. The audio card is very clear about where you are with respect to digital zero.

I really like Stereo Tool. Please don't dumb it down to Stereo Toy.

BETA114 is posted. This is an almost-release-candidate, that's why the new compressor is disabled (we'll web-enabled it after the release, there are some things that can be improved further, once we're done with that we'll release that as well).).

In the last few days we have made a number of important changes:
- Went through all the pages for a cleanup stage, quite a bit of enabled and visibility states have changed.
- Slider ranges changed as mentioned before in this thread.
- Added Broadcast presets, some default settings for common use cases
- STAMP and STudio didn't work, now they do

We might need another beta version before the actual release. But we're trying to freeze development as much as possible at this point.

Let us know if you encounter any issues.

I have a question: Is there any way, to compensate the phase shift from the never phase linear bandpass, especially highpass?
It`s not the phase rotation, so what it can be? Or no such function....? yet?

why built-in presets only load processing? Now you never know which preset Declipper uses or doesn't use etc.

Load built-in presets for what it is intended for. I think it is better to separate built-in presets that are intended for HD or FM as it always was

The reason for this is that many settings in presets were region or situation specific. .For example, in some places it's mandatory to enable Stokkemask, in others it's not. Previously, loading an FM preset would also reset the pilot and RDS levels, and set Stokkemask to whatever setting was used in the preset, etc.

For Declipper, the same thing is true: Some presets use the Declipper, others don't. Some use the Delossifier, others don't. Some presets contained Declipper settings optimized for low bitrate inputs, others for FLAC audio without any resampling. So you never got the optimal behavior for your specific setup, only whatever someone happened to have configured together with their audio settings.

Load a preset with Stokkemask disabled in an area where Stokkemask is mandatory and it could even lead to fines. But if you load a preset with Stokkemask in an area where that's not required, you might not get the optimal audio. Load any non-BS412 preset in a place with BS412 requirements, and the same is true.

Similarly, some FM presets contained streaming settings that were optimized for extremely low bitrates (HD stations in the US with bitrates of often < 48 kbit), while other FM presets have streaming settings that are optimized for hit bitrate streams, sometimes even uncompressed (FLAC) streams. If you like some settings on FM, that shouldn't affect what the "Normal output" signal is optimized for - and there's a mismatch there you'll get very suboptimal results.

Because of this, it makes much more sense if you tell Stereo Tool (by selecting Repair and Broadcast presets separately) what your situation is, and then select a processing preset which only determines what it sounds like. And now you can just configure things to match your setup, and then you can safely switch between built-in presets without having to think about whether your signal is still compliant.

Nearly all the built-in streaming presets that also had an FM version were 100% identical anyway.

If someone sends you a preset, which is set up for your specific situation, they can still send a full preset with everything included. But for built-in presets it just doens't really make sense.

Nice one.
You might want to add Owl City - On the wing. One of the most demanding songs in terms of processing I've ever found.
And if you're working with anything lossy, try the first seconds of Prince - Purple rain. That will drive all lossy codecs crazy.

Since this is liable to get lost in this thread, especially once a new Beta thread comes around, I would recommend throwing this topic in a new properly titled thread in the appropriate subforum for others to post theirs as well. In fact, this seems like something that should definitely exist on this forum somewhere reliable. I saw a few songs suggested in the multiband AGC wishlist thread as well.

It's now reproducing in Reaper with the 64 bit VST3. It never happened to the VST3 before. Beta 112

Hi, I just install ST Standalone 64b Beta 10.02-114 (Sep 10 2023) and WatchCat Version 2.0.7 (build 4d17f6f) / build date Sep 10 2023
Into ST, I save and export the preset 'Modern recording, low bitrate MP3/AAC input' with only Repair settings, but when I try to import it into Watchat, I receive:
Failed to load preset The selected Stereo Tool preset could not be loaded. Please check that it is a valmid preset file.
I try with other preset and same message.

EDIT: No problem with WatchCat Version 2.0.7 (build 0c61cd7) / build date Oct 21 2022