Stereo Tool

Unfortunately the quality and strictness reductions are having no effect at all 7.25 works fine with anything I throw can throw at it--except ND.

My thoughts are that even just your AGC settings are ruining the dynamics a lot more than my entire processing chain that I've been working on for the last few years. My suggestion is you start to experiment with extremely slow yet very high ratio (Inf:1 is good) and see what you can come up with. Use the burst protection stuff in the AGC and Multiband to take care of sudden increases in loudness. They were put there because of my "abusive" use of the multiband to do nothing but spectral balancing, and trying to reduce the dynamics as little as possible. I'll have to share a preset soon to show you what I'm talking about. Some others have said it shows great potential, so I guess it's time I work out the few last weirdnesses with it, if possible, or just let it out with its warts and scars showing, and see what people make from being inspired by it. (there's already a few presets people made from it, none public yet)

I also am going to share a "torture test" of my current HD air-chain, of the Undo™ & Breakaway flavor, on Leif's forum soon... a preset called "Balancing Act". It's a grandson of Passive Aggressor, and extremely mature spectral and loudness balancing without touching the dynamics much at all. There is almost zero peak limiting ever happening, but it's still hitting above -1dB almost all the time.

[edited for spelling]

This time it's working properly again.
http://www.stereotool.com/download/dsp_ ... 5-002B.exe

I've also improved the behavior on big volume changes (the filter stabilizes much faster now after a big level change). I don't think that this change breaks anything but I've added an option to turn the new behavior off; I'll remove it after more testing.

I'll upload a new stand alone version tonight.

Initial tests seem like the CPU load is reduced, but I haven't gone back to really make sure. I just got home, and am going out again in a few minutes, so I'll test more later.

Also, Norton 360 has had some sort of change over the past few days or a couple of weeks that is popping up a new "Download Insight" with warnings about the file, which seems to be more of a "this file is new" warning, and will probably go away as more people download the file and it is analyzed and found to be ok. That's nothing that you can do anything about, and hopefully people installing a beta version know that it might be "new", but I wanted to let you know, just in case you hear any grumblings about it.

Small point but my 7.25 says 7.24 at the top of the screen.

BETA725-002B:
Windows stand alone: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 5-002B.exe
Winamp DSP: http://www.stereotool.com/download/dsp_ ... 5-002B.exe

Winamp DSP version is identical to the previously posted 2B version!

Changes:
- Performance improvements
- Much faster stabilization on large volume changes (buttons added so you can turn it off, I don't think it breaks anything but just be make sure I added those buttons; will remove them as soon as this has been tested.

That's intentional - I change it as soon as it's (nearly) ready to be released. (Which might be soon btw... )

I may have been too hasty in saying that I thought performance improved. I have tried a few other tracks, and the load is in the 80s and 90s like it was before, so it seems like there's a track-dependent variation involved. I'll continue to test, but at this load, it doesn't have significant enough value vs. Crystalizer. That may be an "inaccurate" or "unfair" comparision, because of differences in what they do and that Crystalizer can hit another processor (X-Fi / Quartet DSP), but it is what it is for my current situation. At least this ND is much better performing than the old ND though...

My opinion is pretty much the same as it is for the new multiband. For those that do not have insanely-overclocked Athon64 systems like Bojcha has, and those using Pentium 4 systems, new multiband, and anything based on that same design concept, including this version of Natural Dynamics, just takes more processing power than what we have available.

CPU With natural dynamics enabled.


Intel Pentium D 945.Intel Pentium D CPU 3.40GHz

Natural Dynamics disabled.