I hope this plugin would be interesting for Ardour users.
The Radium Compressor is a compressor with a new and intuitive interface.
The recently released standalone jack version of this compressor has already
been included in Fedora 17 and 18 plus several other depositories.
The compressor has unanimously been praised for it’s user interface. (but it sounds good too!)
It’s so far been available as the built-in compressor in Radium (http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/index.php),
a standalone Jack application (GPL), and as commercial VST and AU plugins for Windows and OSX.
@Ricardus. No LV2. Sorry. I’m working on many other projects, and porting to LV2 is too much work.
@linuxdsp: The gradients are not strange, they help to show the correspondent volume levels between the graphs. The interface of the radium compressor is not only meant for people who are not used to think about what a compressor does, It’s meant as a help to visually know, i.e. immediately, what’s happening, just by looking at it. The transfer function graph shows the same information, but I think the transfer function graph requires a little bit of thinking before you “know” what’s happening. To me, this is obvious, and if you try the program, I think it’s likely you would agree.
@kmatheussen: Thanks for the explanation. Forgive my obvious stupidity, but I wasn’t sure when I first saw it, if I was supposed to interpret it as some kind of graph relating threshold, ratio and make-up gain (and if the size of the regions / gradients were in some way related to the settings, or if the three sections were just an arbitrary size, and you just move the sliders up and down to change the values (in which case I still find it odd that there is a gradient linking the threshold / ratio and ratio / gain?
I understand that rotary controls / conventional meters are not ideal if you are not used to thinking about what a compressor / limiter does (I find that just as ‘immediate’ - but it’s what I’ve become used to) but I’ve also used compressor GUIs where they just display the transfer function e.g. a curve of input vs output, and then overlay the actual signal - as seen by the compressor / side-chain (as it progresses along the curve) on the top. You can just grab points on the graph to change the parameters, which I find completely intuitive too.
I’m interested by this, I admit I haven’t tried it yet, so perhaps all will become clear when I do, but I watched the demo video and I’m not entirely clear about how the UI works - is there a manual or another explanation of what its doing / showing? I’ll admit I’m old fashioned, and I’m used to analogue dials and meters, and relying on my ears more than a GUI to tell me what’s happening, but I’d like to know more about it e.g. what’s the advantage over, for example, a traditional (animated) input vs output graph?
The UI is simple. There are three vertical sliders and two horizontal sliders. The first horizontal slider sets threshold, the second sets ratio, and the third sets makeup gain. The two horizontal sliders are attack and release.
When you use the program, it should be obvious what the green/red gradient colors show. In addition, there are blue lines which shows the volume as interpreted by the DSP routine (i.e. metering). This volume representation (which also includes the lighter blue area showing recent volume span) changes depending on the values of attack and release so that you see immediately how attack and release changes the behavior of the compressor. It’s not the actual volume you see in the graph (whatever “the actual volume” may be), but it’s the volume representation that the compressor uses, and this representation is the one the user is interested in when tuning the parameters.
Another two advantages are that you immediately see the compression ratio (and how it affects the sound) and that adjusting makeup gain is very quick.
I wrote this on the kvraudio forum about normal compressor interfaces: “With normal compressor interfaces, I’m like an autistic guy trying to understand facial expression. It’s possible for an autistic guy to analyze the shape and lines of a face to understand the feelings, but it takes time. It’s not immediate.”. This is what I believe this compressor interface does better.
@kmatheussen: I added the support for native linux VST (there have been some changes since I submitted the original patches, but as far as I’m aware it works fine). You’re correct that you can change the path ardour searches for linuxVSTs, by default it looks in /usr/local/lxvst The binaries are compiled with this support enabled (at least, the A3 RCs have been and I would expect it to be the same for the official release)
@linuxdsp: It doesn’t seem like /usr/local/lxvst is used anymore in Ardour3. I can’t get it to work by testing, and in line 143 of linux_vst_support.cc, the load function returns 0 if “LXVST_PATH” is not defined.
Thank you. I’ve just checked ardour3, and the plugin runs fine. I spent some time figuring out how to support native vst plugins though, so here some quick info to get it running:
Ardour3 must be compiled with the --lxvst flag. I don’t know if available binaries of ardour3 have this flag. I hope so though.
If not, compile ardour3 like this:
./waf configure --lxvst
./waf
./waf install
Ardour3 uses the environment flag “LXVST_PATH” to denote vst plugins path. Start ardour3 like this:
export LXVST_PATH=/home//vstplugins/
ardour3
