Stereo Tool

We have worked on improving the behavior on several of these in the last days; I have visited a local station that was using the Adaptive Bass Monster Dense preset and later spent several hours with someone who sets up lots of stations and we tried to fix these effects. I apparently didn't really have songs where this caused issues in my test set; I do now.

Here are a few changes that we made:

• We slowed down the attack to 750. So that's a lot slower, which helps against short loud sounds that caused some ducking.
• Added gating on the MB,
• Set Level drop compensation more aggressively, so it's pulling up soft pieces much more. This helps not only when a new song starts, but it also causes the level to be increased faster after a loud chorus.
• Increased Window, but made it work less strongly on release. While making the window act stronger on release sounds nice, it slows down recovery after loud sounds.
• Using clipping and limiting now, and changed the limiter types for some of the bands.
• Reduced band linking, which tends to make ducking problems much worse.
• Increased 'Dense audio level boost' by 1 dB, this makes (based on test) very loud choruses about 0.5-0.8 dB louder.

The slower attack greatly reduces the level effects on loud choruses. The limiting and clipping removes the start of something loud which makes everything sound much "tighter" and more controlled, although it will cause some loss of punch so we might need to tweak the settings further.


Here's the resulting preset. Please note this this is work in progress; we spent some time on it last week but weren't finished yet.
Oscar_20240126.sts


Ducking on chorus seems to be far less of an issue when running in peak mode instead of RMS mode. I'm planning to look into that tomorrow. But just switching the detection from RMS to Peak might help quite a bit. Of course that does come at a cost in consistency.

Hans do we need the latest 10.22 beta to run this preset or it works just as good with the latest release 10.21?

10.21 should work fine as well, there are no changes in the code for this.

I have made some small changes, the Intellilimiter threshold wasn't increased which was necessary with the slower attack. This caused dynamic highs to be pushed down too much, which caused some loss in "strength" (I don't mean level but how 'strong'/punchy etc the highs sound). The Intellilimiter increase + slowdown together MIGHT be slightly too much, we're going to listen to this on FM with a bunch of people for the next few days.
Oscar_20240129.sts

Right, I have no VirtualDJ folder in my documents folder. The tutorials appear to be for a previous version or something. Let us know if the VST3's work.

They changed it some time ago for new installations to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualDJ
e: a VST3 also shows up in the effects-list, didn't know that!

Hans, there is something I don't understand about licensing.

There is a red banner about an unregistered license, however I can't find witch setting it caused.
Pushing the button "Turn all unlicensed features of" doesn't make any change.

edit: Ah yes. The button to turn off unlicensed features doesn't work on the Adaptive selection on multiband1 after I disable everything with the button, then manually reenable it