TDM Software Plug-ins

Mike Collins concludes his look at the available TDM software plug‑ins, concentrating this month on those made by third‑party manufacturers.

Last month, we looked at the TDM software plug‑ins manufactured by Digidesign for their own Pro Tools systems. However, many so‑called 'third‑party' TDM plug‑ins are now available. This month, I'm looking at nine of these manufacturers and their products.

Ina‑Grm

• GRM TOOLS

GRM Tools is a bundle of plug‑ins (not sold separately) developed by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel in Paris (hence INA‑GRM). A standard interface is used for all the GRM Tools plug‑ins, with a set of controllers for the various parameters plus 16 memory buttons for the presets. With these, you can make several different settings, store each of them, then click on any of the memory buttons to recall your settings. The current settings will then crossfade automatically to the new set over an amount of time which you set (in seconds) using the slider on the far right of each window. Alternatively, you can drag the slider at the bottom of each window to move manually between the first eight of the stored settings.

The Comb Filters are offered as banks of either 1 or 5 filters, in mono and stereo, and it is possible to use up to ten filters per DSP chip used — so you could use ten one‑band mono or five one‑band stereo, and so forth. You can create great 'robot voice' effects using these at extreme settings, or simply 'fatten up' your vocal or instrumental sounds with more subtle settings.

The Equalizer features 23 bands of graphic EQ, and versions are available in mono using one DSP chip, or stereo using two DSP chips. Once you get used to the idea of being able to instantly switch between EQ settings, or to slowly interpolate between settings, the possibilities for mixing quickly multiply — so watch out, or you could find yourself fiddling around with this one for ages!

The Doppler effect simulation is available in both stereo and mono versions, and lets you swing your sound source around in space, shifting in pitch as it passes the 'listening' position. The presets here really show off the creative possibilities for special effects, rather than simply simulating trains or motorbikes passing by.

Shuffling offers 'micro‑random placing' of audio fragments using one DSP chip, with mono input and stereo output. Using this, you can have fragments of your audio source automatically moving around in the stereo field according to the envelope setting, while they are shifted in pitch between the settings you make for initial and final pitch. You can also randomise the pitch settings. The effects have to be heard to be understood, but I can assure you that you won't be disappointed if you are looking for unusual sounds!

In all, the GRM Tools effects are very neatly implemented as TDM plug‑ins, and provide a palette of unusual effects particularly aimed at the sound designer working with electronic music or creating sound effects to match pictures.

GRM Tools; around £250 inc VAT (UK price yet to be confirmed).

Arboretum

• HYPERPRISM

HyperPrism effects are now available as a TDM plug‑in — currently at version 1.01. This software lets you control two parameters (such as pitch and frequency) by dragging a point across a blue‑coloured screen to set values according to the x and y positions within the screen. A wide range of effects is available, and, like GRM Tools, they are ideally suited to sound effects creation — particularly for composers working to picture.

You get 14 real‑time simultaneous effects: filters (low‑pass, high‑pass, band‑pass, band‑reject), vibrato, a ring modulator, pitch changer, flanger, balance, pan (auto pan, tremolo), stereo dynamics, more stereo, and M‑S matrix. HyperPrism Consoles v1.2, including Max v3.0 TimeLine editing features, are also supplied with the software.

HyperPrism v1.1 (which should be available very soon) adds nine more effects: chorus, phaser, quasi stereo, hyper stereo, hyper pan (stereo tremolo, crossing pan, non‑crossing pan, sweeping pan), and doppler. You also get new automation features and simultaneous MIDI control of all inserted effects.

You can either apply effects to your audio in real time using File mode, or use the Thru mode, which turns your HyperPrism TDM plug‑in into a powerful multi‑effects box. Built‑in MIDI automation lets you record and playback effects variations using a Pro Tools MIDI track, and you can also control or edit your effects from any external MIDI device or OMS‑compatible sequencer — synchronised to MTC if necessary. Two instances of the same effect can be used per single DSP chip (except with the pitch changer, where you only get one instance per chip).

The excellent pitch‑shifter can also be used as a harmoniser, and the new flanger delivers superb results, as does the ring modulator and the spatialisation effects. The filters offer resonance controls and much more. In short, the HyperPrism effects are of first‑class quality.

Steinberg

• DECLICKER

The DeClicker eliminates single clicks or pops on vinyl records, movie soundtracks, or on magnetic tape due to dropouts — or maybe from lip noises in speech, guitar plectrum noise, knocking the microphone during recording, or as a result of sync problems when transferring material between digital devices. DeClicker is ideal for removing these, although it is not a decrackler or a denoiser, so it won't eliminate a series of short crackles or the hiss on a recording. I tested the DeClicker on a stereo mix I had edited using Sound Designer II, in which several clicks had appeared at the edit points, and it immediately removed these 'just like magic' using the default settings. On the other hand, I digitised a track from a vinyl album which had a loud pop half‑way through, and DeClicker could not remove this completely, although it 'tamed' it to the point where it was only just audible. Overall, this one is worth buying.

• VIRTUAL FX RACK

The Virtual FX Rack is a collection of five TDM plug‑ins (not sold separately), including the Hallelujah chorus, Pandora autopanning, Stereo Wizard stereo image enhancer, PlateRunner reverb, and the Y‑Cables, which let you mix two into one or patch one into two. These plug‑ins make very efficient use of DSP power — you can run both Pandora and the Stereo Wizard on one DSP chip, with Hallelujah chorus and the Y‑Cables mini‑mixer/patcher on another, while PlateRunner uses up a complete DSP chip on its own.

PlateRunner is a digital simulation of plate reverb, and takes a mono input which it outputs as a stereo signal. I found this quite handy for some of the less prominent elements within my mixes — although it is no match for Digidesign's DVerb. The Hallelujah chorus is OK for softening pads or vocals, or to thicken the sound of a solo instrument — without sounding particularly exciting. Pandora is a straightforward autopanner which lets you take a mono signal, position this within the stereo field, and automatically change the pan position. This proved very useful on assorted percussion parts and pulsing synth sounds within my mixes.

The '2‑in, 1‑out' Y‑Cables is basically a mini‑mixer. The volume of signals at the input and at the output is independently adjustable, and stereo signals can be phase‑inverted. The '1‑in, 2‑out' module, on the other hand, takes one input and connects this to two outputs. You can use Y‑Cables to create various useful or just crazy effects by creating feedback loops — you just route an effect signal to the input of the same module or to the input of another module in your chain of effects.

The Stereo Wizard is intended to let you change the spatial content of a stereo signal within the stereo field, to achieve a more spacious sound with an increased sense of depth and separation. It is designed for individual instruments as well as for stereo mastering, although it is not fully mono‑compatible. The main control here is 'Effect', and higher settings of this are supposed to result in a wider spatial reproduction of the instruments within the stereo field. The Stereo Wizard is not as fully‑featured as any of the other spatialiser plug‑ins, and when I tried using it on a backing vocal, it simply made the vocal quieter, with no audible effect on the spatial positioning — not so clever! If you need a budget reverb with a useable chorus and autopanner, and a couple of other effects thrown in 'for luck' then the Virtual FX Rack is a good buy for the price.

DeClicker £799; Virtual FX Rack £249. Prices include VAT.

Crystal River Engineering

• PROTRON

ProTron is a mono‑to‑stereo plug‑in that allows you to take mono sound files and process them into a stereo spatialised format. ProTron uses proprietary technology, which works out what audio should be in the ear canal and reproduces it. This is done for a particular human ear canal and may sound different to different people. It works best over headphones, rather than speakers, and has an extremely easy‑to‑use graphical interface — where you can just 'mouse around' a source icon to place the sound source at a desired location in your perceptual space. Nearfield speakers do work nearly as well as headphones, and wide speaker arrays are not too bad, but narrow arrays with the speakers close together are not so good.

The Materials pop‑up menu lets you select the type of reflective material which you want to simulate on the walls of your 'virtual room', and you just drag the 'source' icon around within this 'room' to position the apparent source of your sound anywhere in relation to the listener icon. Sliders are available to set the room size, the amount of doppler effect, and the apparent vertical position between floor and ceiling. All this is just a breeze to use, as it is immediately obvious how to control everything, and I was able to use this very effectively with my layered guitars and keyboards to keep these separated within my mixes. I also found that ProTron worked very effectively in conjunction with reverb, as you can use it to simulate the characteristics of various types of wall surface, and adjust the apparent distance between source and listener at the stroke of a mouse. Finally, this processor is mono‑compatible, so you don't have to worry about losing any of your mix elements during a mono mixdown!

Qsound Labs

• QSYS

In conventional stereo, you can use panning, relative level adjustments, dry/reverberant ratio, EQ adjustments, doppler shift for moving sounds, and similar techniques to achieve spatialisation within the stereo field. All of these except panning are primarily used to provide an impression of distance. QSound Labs' famous QSound processing (and now the TDM plug‑in version, QSys), on the other hand, allows you to place sound sources well beyond the bounds of conventional stereo, extending the soundfield into a 180 degree arc in front of the listener.

In a dense mix with many tracks, you can use QSys to spread out the instruments and find spaces for each of the various elements. You simply drag a point within the semi‑circular display to place the sound source anywhere you like. In practice, this worked exactly as it is intended on my backing vocals and sax licks. Another useful technique is to position your reverb and echo returns using QSys to put the ambience 'out in the room' where it belongs. This way, you will find that you can use much more dramatic reverb than normal on account of reduced smearing and masking of the dry source. QSys also features the best autopanning I have encountered, where you can draw in the path you want your panned mix element to follow, and edit and store these paths as setups for later.

The Amused to Death album by Roger Waters (ex‑Pink Floyd) was mixed using the QSound process, and is probably the finest example. This TDM plug‑in now offers similar processing at a much more affordable price.

Waves

• S1

The S1 stereo imager is a specialised tool for rebalancing or re‑arranging the positions of sound images within a stereo mix, as well as a corrective tool for some typical errors in stereo files. So, for instance, you can pull down the level of left sounds or pull up the level of right sounds, while keeping the volume of centrally‑positioned sounds between the two extremes. Or you can keep the stereo balance completely unchanged while moving central sounds over to one side of the stereo stage or the other. This is ideal for correcting lopsided stereo mixes without altering the level balance. The Width control lets you adjust the relative balance of centre and edge‑stage sounds and the width of the stereo image, and correction is also provided for the two most common stereo imaging errors: channel polarity errors and stereo channel reversal. The S1 lets you view and control the stereo sound stage using a stereo 'vector' display, by dragging the mouse to alter the rotation and gain parameters simultaneously.

• L1

You can use the L1 UltraMaximiser to maximise both the level of the digital signal and the resolution of your final audio using dithering and noise‑shaping. This is particularly useful for mastering multimedia, or for any other application that requires quantisation of the digital signal. Quantisation from 24‑ or 20‑bit down to 16‑bit resolution results in a loss of sound quality, and an increase in low‑level noise and distortion.

Waves' offerings are worthy of a place in every professional Pro Tools‑based studio.

TDM processing uses 24 bits, and this has to be pulled back down to 16 bits by rounding or truncation prior to mastering for CD. The resulting rounding error can produce audible distortion at low levels, and if the audio signal is repeatedly processed and truncated back to 16 bits, the losses accumulate. Proper use of dithering techniques can convert the low‑level non‑linear distortion into a simple steady hiss, at the expense of increased background noise. The perceived level of this can be greatly reduced by optimising the shaping of the overall noise to match the ear's frequency‑dependent sensitivity curves — ie. 'noise‑shaping'. The L1 uses Waves IDR (Increased Digital Resolution) processing developed by Michael Gerzon, which is claimed to be much better than simple dithering, and enables a 16‑bit system to deliver 18‑19 bits of perceived performance. Waves IDR is comparable in quality with many of the more highly‑publicised 'bit‑mapping' or 'Super‑Resolution' technologies currently used for mastering CDs. The L1 is designed to be used at the final stage of processing or mastering, and includes wider options for IDR than you get with the other Waves plug‑ins, to allow fine‑tuning prior to mastering.

• Q10

The Q10 parametric EQ is a precision tool for effects like pseudo‑stereo processing, adding or removing pre‑emphasis, correction of errors in multimedia files, precision bandsplitting, precision brickwall bandlimiting, hum removal, and much, much more. Each EQ band can cover the full frequency range with a very wide Q range, and can be set as shelving, pass, or parametric filters. In the control window, you can make A/B comparisons and view the graph produced by the DSP — so you can see the actual response. To edit the settings, you simply manipulate the graph with the mouse. The Q10 filters are all 'noise‑shaped' to preserve the optimum signal‑to‑noise ratio at all times, giving 110dB signal‑to‑noise in the digital domain, no matter what EQ settings you use. This noise‑shaping also provides a spectral re‑distribution of the noise floor, shifting noise products from the mid‑range into a higher frequency range where the ear is less sensitive. Michael Gerzon has created an extensive library of setup files for the Q10 including pseudo‑stereo filters, telephone and AM radio EQs, super‑parametrics, deep supernotches, psychoacoustic noise filters and much more. This library includes EQ setups for sample rate conversion, hard bandlimiting for speech and broadcasting, classic EQ implementations such as the Baxandall equaliser, and multimedia applications where compensation is needed for high‑frequency losses in Sound Designer II. In short, this is the EQ for just about all occasions!

• C1

The C1 compressor/gate actually has three independent stereo processing modules which can be used together in many different ways. The compressor/expander can be configured as a high‑level compressor, a gentle high‑level expander, or as a mid‑level compressor whose compression can be 'tuned' at any user‑chosen signal level. The gate/expander can operate either as a fully‑featured expander or gate. It can also be used to 'compress‑up' lower‑level signals. The filter has a variety of capabilities from conventional side‑chain dynamics processing to the unique bandsplit dynamic EQ mode — which allows compression, expansion or gating of any desired frequency band. The C1 setups library allows the C1 to be configured as a wide range of specialised processors. You get conventional high‑level compression or low‑level expansion, gating, a de‑esser, noise‑reducers for background hiss, de‑reverberation to reduce the effect of room reverb (especially on speech), rumble removal, a speech intelligibility enhancer, ducking, gating or expansion of one signal keyed by another, dynamic or keyed EQ, mid‑level compression and low‑level detail enhancer. You can even use two or three of these at the same time — so you could compress a file while removing side‑effects, such as increased audibility of noise or room reverberation.

As a suite of plug‑ins, the Waves offerings are ideal for high‑quality processing prior to mastering your final mixes, and, as such, are worthy of a place in every professional Pro Tools‑based project studio.

S1 £499; L1 £599; Q10 £459; C1 £649; bundle of all plug‑ins £1999. Prices include VAT.

Antares Systems

Note: news reached us as we were going to press that the plug‑in company formerly known as Jupiter Systems has changed its title to the new astronomically‑related title shown above.

• MDT

Antares' MDT plug‑in can be configured to create compressors, limiters, expanders, downward expanders/gates, 'soft‑knee' compressors or limiters, 'tube' companders, or any combination of these. In multi‑band mode, MDT can create de‑essers, spectral enhancers and dynamic EQs, as well as compressors and expanders that suppress the effects of artefacts like breathing and pumping. This is a serious engineer's tool, which delivers excellent results. Applications include mastering, individual track processing, sound effects, sample editing and so forth.

• JVP

The Jupiter Voice Processor [no name change on the plug‑in yet, then — Ed] includes a de‑esser, a compressor with a downward expanding gate, a parametric EQ, and a multi‑tap delay. It is particularly intended for vocal processing, and is excellent on individual instruments and sound effects. It can be used very effectively for mastering stereo files, as its compressor/gate and EQ operate simultaneously. Also, the JVP makes very efficient use of DSP power, by running four processes on two audio channels using only one DSP chip — so you get plenty of 'bang for your buck'! Along the top of the control window, there are buttons to switch the controls between the de‑esser, compressor/gate, parametric EQ and delay effects — all the typical processing you might wish to use with your vocals. The de‑esser lets you remove excessive sibilance — loud 'S' and 'F' sounds — and the compressor/gate has a similar design to the MDT, but with less flexibility. The parametric EQ can handle 140dB of dynamic range, and has three filter sections, two of which can be configured as different filter types including low‑pass, low‑shelving, peak/notch, high‑shelving and high‑pass. Finally, the delay effects actually provide more control than the delays normally found in hardware reverb and delay units. In addition to having six individually‑adjustable taps, you can use negative gain and adjustable comb filtering to create a wide variety of effects. Presets are provided for typical effects like vocal doubling and telephone voice simulation, and you can save your own favourite setups for future mixes.

In practice, the Antares plug‑ins worked very effectively, and were ideal for processing individual tracks. As with the Waves suite, these deserve a place in every well‑equipped Pro Tools‑based studio.

Apogee

• MASTERTOOLS

Once you have finalised your processing and mixing, you need to prepare a final output file which uses just the 16 bits which are available on DAT or CD, rather than the 24 bits available within your TDM system. The TDM buss works at 24‑bit resolution to provide the extra dynamic range you need to mix several 16‑bit signals together. You also need extra dynamic range if you process 16‑bit audio using any digital effects such as compressors, EQ and so forth. Apogee have come up with a solution here in the form of their UV22 encoding process, which is now available as the MasterTools plug‑in for TDM systems.

UV22 encoding adds an inaudible high‑frequency 'bias' to the digital bitstream, which works rather like the bias on an analogue tape recorder, smoothing out magnetic tape recording non‑linearities. With noise‑shaping and bit‑mapping systems, users often hear the noise floor changing with the music. Traditional dither adds noise which actually raises the noise floor. In contrast, Apogee claim, UV22 presents a constant, smooth and stable noise floor, unobtrusively at the theoretical minimum level, but through which can be heard undistorted detail up to 30dB lower in level — extending full‑fidelity information beyond 20‑bit resolution to your 16‑bit CD. UV22 is expected to be the final step in the signal chain before CD mastering, so no more processing of any kind should be performed on the UV22‑processed data.

For those of you waiting for an accurate meter for Pro Tools, both in timing and level, MasterTools also offers an extremely accurate monitoring system, which shows level, phase and balance information presented both in real time and as a 'history'. MasterTools can track any digital 'overs', so you can remix or modify to eliminate these, and a facility is provided to automatically normalise these peaks.

If you edit signals with different levels of DC on them, you can get clicks and pops at your edit points. MasterTools can automatically remove any DC offset in real time — a feature not available anywhere else.

MasterTools is ideal for small project studios using Digidesign equipment, where people might otherwise be using a Spirit Folio, a Mackie or suchlike, which would not have the metering, switching or processing features to let you sort these things out.

Grey Matter Response

• MEZZO

Lastly, but by no means less importantly, keeping track of all the various files used in a particular project and managing your backup and archiving systems is an extremely important aspect of using any digital audio system. Grey Matter Response have developed their Mezzo backup software to take care of all this for you. This system can even backup and restore files in the background while you continue working on your edits. This is virtually essential for busy studios which cannot afford to have their editing suites out of action for the considerable lengths of time needed to transfer files in or out of the system.