What’s this “inline scope” plugin shown on the first 2 tracks and the right (selected) track/bus? Is it some sort of live waveform that displays whatever the plugins before it output in the same fashion a new waveform is generated live when you record? If that’s the case then it is really quite nice! What a fantastic new feature!
I can see a “stereo phase-correlation” section on the far right bus. I guess this is like the one on Mixbuss that tells you wether something is fully mono or how much of it is stereo, right? If so, then bravo again! This kind of plugin is very useful in many situations
The addition of built-in plugins is something I love, cause it encourages learning and sharing. Now with fluidsynth the set looks very complete, but have you considered adding a gate to the set? Just wondering cause that one’s essential too IMO especially when recording
Two quick usage questions if I may: sometimes when I’m in a channel strip a plugin becomes deselected (red outline dissappears) if I move the mouse pointer away from it. I’m not sure why this happens nor how to change it but what’s the explanation for this behaviour?
When tweaking the theme, I’ve noticed the more changes I make the lomger it takes for the program to update. E.g. If I change the transparency or colour setting for time stretch fill it will take only a few seconds before I can see it, but after I’ve made changes to other things and try changing it again it can take up to a minute or more for the program to update. Does this still happen in version 5?
You can probably guess I’m not on v5 (4.7 to be exact) but I’d like to know the answer to these questions before upgrading, and tbh the program works fairly well overall despite what I said above so there’s no hurry to update, though some of the new features are quite tempting especially the inline scope and stereo phase-correlation plugins.
Sorry if the post is too long and thanks for this outstanding software!
Regarding (4): when you leave the mixer-strip, any selected plugins become deselected.
This is because, currently, the plugin selections and editor (region) selections aren’t aware of each other. So for example it was possible to leave a plugin selected in the editor-mixer-strip, then select something in the editor, and it was ambiguous which one would get deleted if you pressed Delete. A better fix is to make plugins and audio regions mutually-exclusive, so you can’t have both selected at the same time. But the current fix was easy, and it avoids some cases of user-error.
(1) Yes, it’s a live scrolling waveform which displays the waveform at the point where the plugin is inserted. The plugin is called “a-Inline Scope” and included with Ardour. There’s also a-Inline Spectrogram.
(2) This is a 3rd party plugin. Here meters.lv2 (x42-meters). And yes this stereo-correlation meter serves the same purpose as the one built into Mixbus master-bus, only since it’s a plugin you can add it anywhere (e.g. the monitoring section). There are other plugin vendors adding support for mixer-strip inline-displays (it does not make sense for all plugins)
(3) yes, and a limiter and … though someone needs to step up and find the time and do it. The current plugins are curated and maintained by Damien Zammit of zamaudio.
Ben: I see. I’m happy to wait for the better fix, but currently what’s the smartest way to A/B 2 plugins? I do it with the mousewheel click when they’re one below the other, but this becomes a bit difficult when they’re further apart in the strip, and also you have to hear the dry signal inbetween which isn’t always wanted. I think ideally you would select a set of enabled plugins along with a set of disabled plugins and press a key command or button in the mixer strip to instantly turn the enabled ones off and the disabled ones on, and viceversa, effectively A/B-ing the two sets . I’m not in front of my computer now but I reckon there are context menu entries, and hence possible shortcut commands, to A/B plugins in this way, right?
x42: (2) Ah, so it’s the famous meters.lv2 set. Interesting, what kind of plugins can support this inline display? Do they have to be LV2 or can Ladspa and other formats also add this feature?
(3) The author of zamcomp and zamgate? they’re in good hands then!
(2) LADSPA plugins cannot provide a GUI to begin with. So only LV2 plugins and Ardour/Lua scripts can currently provide inline-displays.
A first idea was to simply wrap a miniaturized, scaled version of the “normal” GUI, so that no extra work for plugin authors would be needed and any plugin standard could be used, but that’s pretty much useless given the size constraints (think 100x100px).
It’s highly unlikely that Apple will extend the AU spec or that VST4 will feature this… but who knows.
(3) yes, the very same. “a-comp” is based on zamcomp for example. All included plugins are not novel, but rather a fork of existing plugins.
though someone needs to step up and find the time and do it. The current plugins are curated and maintained by Damien Zammit of zamaudio.