Stereo Tool

@Bojcha, What's the difference between Bojcha's Balkan and Bojcha's Radium? Is it only different pre-emphasis?
@Hans, is it possible to make the green to yellow bar for the buffers blink red when it's having a buffer underrun? I want to use stereotool with as minimal latency as possible withouth glitches.

Hi Eldoradofm,

First obvious difference is that Radium have much more lows and highs, and Balkan is more relaxed.

2 small fixes coming up:
- Voice vibration filter was based on left and right channels combined, with a stronger focus on the left channel, which is incorrect. Now it's based on the channel with the loudest bass (the bass behaves identical on both channels to preserve the stereo image).
- Last few stages in the Loudness filter: I continuously kept clipping the bass, but apparently that has no effect on the bass level in the end result. On top of that, I was clipping the highs separately from the bass which is not needed and reduces the audio quality. I'm now using less bass clipping stages, which results in a lower CPU load (Loudness is now ~ 26% slower than in version 5.02, vs. 30-31% in BETA72/74). Note that when you use extreme bass settings combined with very high Punch and Max Punch levels there's a change that clipping (if you don't select 'Very strict') might occasionally be slightly less effective - so far I have not seen this but it might be possible. (And I've really measured the difference levels).

See previous post. In short:
- Slightly lower CPU load
- Probably slightly better highs in Loudness if you don't enable 'very strict' bass clipping (very strict should still sound slightly better, but the CPU load is much higher).

Winamp DSP plugin: http://www.stereotool.com/download/dsp_ ... 510-75.exe
Stand alone version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 510-75.exe
VST version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/vst_ ... 510-75.dll
VST version (No SSE2): http://www.stereotool.com/download/vst_ ... 510-75.dll
Command line version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 510-75.exe
Linux command line version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... BETA510-75 (not available)
Linux GUI version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... BETA510-75 (not available)

( I want to use stereotool with as minimal latency as possible withouth glitches )
ill second that, since I use it for everything.

Been playing with some settings and to my surprise I found that disabling the final limiter makes things much less pumping, more consistant, opener and actually louder too.
I checked the output and I don't really hear any distortion and due to the hard limit I can't see any peaks above 100%.

i have found a display bug in the FM STEREO HISS REMOVAL WINDOW the window is out of the box.




and that's the latest version of stereo tool

Really? That would be great news - I was trying to reduce the CPU load by simplifying and optimizing the Loudness filter, but if this filter can be turned off it should reduce the CPU load considerably.

(Actually this is starting to make sense to me now: Before Loudness contained some filters that didn't really perform very well. I've improved them now, so they should be far better able to handle loud sounds. And I didn't improve Final Limiter in the same way.)

I guess I should then always enable the final limiter 'Low CPU usage' mode if Loudness is enabled (because that basically bypasses the Final Limiter, but its volume slider still works.)

Fixed (not yet in the next BETA because I was already building it, but will be fixed in the one after that).

CPU load optimizations:
- Optimized some code to reduce CPU load with no audio changes
- Removed some filters that filtered low clipping artifacts in high frequency areas - seems to have very little effect (probably no effect on the quality).
- Added a 'Filter' checkbox to enable/disable filtering clipping effects for very low bass frequencies (the 0-150/350 Hz part). Turning this on SLIGHTLY (1-3%) reduces the bass level (eg. filtering is stricter). Not sure if it has any effect on the audio quality (should be VERY little if any); it does reduce Loudness CPU load by 5%.

Winamp DSP plugin: http://www.stereotool.com/download/dsp_ ... 510-76.exe
Stand alone version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 510-76.exe
VST version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/vst_ ... 510-76.dll
VST version (No SSE2): http://www.stereotool.com/download/vst_ ... 510-76.dll
Command line version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 510-76.exe
Linux command line version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... BETA510-76 (not available)
Linux GUI version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... BETA510-76 (not available)


Edit: Measured performance of this version (default settings) with FM Loud Bass Europe preset.
Result:
- CPU load is 12% higher than that of version 5.02.
- If I disable Final Limiter in this BETA (as Luke suggested), it's 6% higher than that of version 5.02.
Not bad, given the amount of extra (and better) filtering that's taking place.