DMGAudio

I moved here, to my own company, DMGAudio.

And I have a new blog too!

Cheers!

Dave.

2.04 is out!

... and Mastering is going back to beta today ... after some serious reshuffling and tweakage (I'm generally skeptical of things that undergo a lot of tweakage, but it does just sound effortlessly awesome all day now. It actually pains me to admit that, bizarrely, 'cause there were some changes I wasn't initially any too keen on. But dammit they sound GREAT now.)

I'm just tidying up the graph (ironically the same graph that was the first posting here to reveal that the Mastering plugs were on their way)... then I hit "BUILD EVERYTHING" and off it goes.

And then it'll be back for TDM porting... :D

How to fix a psycho Mac Pro

Hi,

I'll just act like there hasn't been a huge gap in posting...

I have a Mac Pro. It's been acting... well... completely broken.
On startup, the two DVI screens take it in turns to flick off and on for three minutes before i can log in, my SaffireLE starts up desynchronised from the firewire bus, and my USB-MIDI devices literally crash out after a half-hour of use.

Today I fixed it.
If you have any symptoms like this, the following information may just save you a metric ton of grief.
Bit of a disappointing fix, but here it goes:
- Connect your DVIs through VGA adapters.
Rubbish, I know, but there -seems- to be some weird timing issue whereby the DVIs -spank- the data clock from the graphics card, which is messing with the bus clocks for the USB+FW. Ouch.
I genuinely can't believe that this could happen, but it certainly does look this way.

Now all my devices work fine (although my macpro still takes a full minute to boot, somehow... i'm just spoiled I guess). The Saffire works perfectly, and the system is rock solid. Awesome.

I'm going to NAMM!

Wow! So I am finally going to visit the US!

My first trip to the states!

So, if anyone has any tips for:
- finding cigars in anaheim
- surviving as an eccentric englishman in america
- not going hoarse at a tradeshow
please let me know!!

If you'll be at NAMM, it'd be GREAT to meet you! I will mostly be hanging around at the Toontrack stand (our new allies :D ), stand 1100 in hall E.

As for Sonalksis activity - I've been preparing for the show, and the mastering tools are doing good in beta. Hope to launch fairly soon :D:D

See you there!!

Progress Update

Hi.

It's been a tense one today. I finish work for the year tomorrow (to work on my thesis). This afternoon, I was three days behind schedule. This evening has been intense. With a good codebase you can work wonders though ;)
I need to wake up tomorrow, finish the DSP for Ultimate-D (just some tweaking), do final builds, do final alpha tests, and then I can ship MultiLimit, MaxLimit and Ultimate-D to beta. Wooh.
It's been painful, like it always is.
Looks like a release early next year is fairly plausible... so we're on track! :)
I am, however, not on track for the 80s party I am attending tomorrow evening. I should have my hair dyed by now (I am going as Hannibal from the A-Team. For the cigars, basically.).

Weird. These plugins are actually alive. How exciting!
I mentioned about the Analogue Clip being pretty groovy.
MultiLimit imparts an almost magical bigness to things. When I finish my first pop album, it'll be mastered with that. MaxLimit (especially since I added in the delay-compensation stuff) works very nicely even on tracks/busses in a session. Very groovy.
Ultimate-D is probably the least exciting plugin I've ever worked on, but if you need really really really good dither, then you probably could get quite excited about it.

However, something it's VERY easy (for me) to get excited about is that we WON AN AWARD FOR TBK3!
How cool is that?!? (more details to follow...)

Yaaay!

Dave.

BanPiracy, Waves and iLok

Hi,

I was reading this earlier:

http://studionebula.com/blog/2007/12/02/why-i-boycott-products-that-use-paceilok-and-why-you-should-too

I found myself wondering the following:

What need is there for Banpiracy?

Waves plugins are iLok protected, and iLok hasn't been cracked, right?

Any ideas anyone?

Plans and Reality

Gosh.

Today I got a healthy dose of how well things can turn out, when plans turn into reality.

So, you might have seen somewhere, we said we'd have an analogue clip on MaxLimit / MultiLimit?

Well, as of this evening, those two are now feature complete... there's polishing and optimising to do yet, but really not more than another day's worth of work, and they'll go to beta (Did I mention that StereoTools is in beta now? :D:D:D).

Now, as you also might recall, I'm striving for a PhD in nonlinear system theory, which means when I say "analogue clip", it really does actually have to be an analogue clip.
Following on with my current theme of making everything sound much simpler than it really is, the only difference between an analogue and a digital clip is the aliasing. Granted, most people claim to have alias-free clipping, and I'm sure that some do, I just haven't been given a copy of them. However, we needed 16 odd orders (a clip is symmetric, so there IS no even order distortion. None. I promise.), and it had to be alias free. I have some tricks for this, so I coded it up, and WOW.

Now, +obviously+ it's not for everything. I mean, you don't clip an acoustic recording, that would just be plain weird. But you do clip dancey stuff. And when you do, with this, BAD THINGS HAPPEN. This is, I think, almost a better reaction than I got from people with TBK3. And that was pretty silly. Perhaps I will post a clip.... of the clip ;)

Ez.