Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Post your spectrogram discoveries here
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BarkFilter and MagicDeathEye look quite strange
Interesting, thanks!
Great imagines @jolico. Ate we any closer to understanding the magic of the Barkfilter tripleband preset
Ill just repost this as it seems relevant.
The most excellent Dan from FabFilter will happily explain some of those weird spectrographs here ... (from 8.20)
Indeed
@jolico Nice - also though about posting a spectrogram ‚picture‘ - which software did you use ?
I know that wavemapper can import pictures, but the spectrum‘s resolution is quite poor.
Importing with Virtual ANS seems to be a lot better, but one probably needs to carefully rescale and mask the content.
It took a few more steps than I expected
Typed the text into “Notes” in dark mode while leaving lots of empty lines above the text
took a screenshot
Darkened the shadows to make the background completely black
Cropped
Loaded the image into this app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acoustic-picture-transmitter-pro/id416707027
Screen recorded the above app with the audio playing
extracted the audio from the screen recording with this https://apps.apple.com/us/app/export-audio/id1260980663
...and you know the rest
What did it sound like?
Fascinating! I just last night watched Christian Henson’s video in which he uses a spectrogram to show how layering a synth pad affects the sound:
Like this:
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Thanks, sounds a lot like finger-painting in Virtual ANS3
I always wondered where they got the inspiration for those Gothic cathedrals back in the Middle Ages. Thank you for clearing up that little mystery.
Fascinating stuff @jolico
@jolico really love the one of the rss compressor. What do you make of that app by the way, they always seem to do easy to use but super musical stuff.
I like all of their apps and they’re all “free-to-try”
Yes, I also like that aspect of their stuff, must give it a whirl
I'm sure you are not far from reality. Architecture is often linked to special ratio (golden number, etc) and you know that the golden number is also used in music...
That is a linear scale sine sweep, right? If so then that curve is just the shape of the Hz-to-Bark conversion function:
BarkFreq = 6 arcsinh( HzFreq/600 )
In other words, its just the arcsinh function curve:
The other side of the curve where it goes downwards is due to digital aliasing.
Yes.
The input was just a straight 3 second sine sweep from 20 to 20,000
Ok it was just to put some mysticism in my life...back to the hard math reality 😉
I very much enjoyed @jolico's discoveries and the FF video referenced by @Richtowns!
MagicDeathEye does clearly exhibit the digital reflections - this was already noted in @Blue_Mangoo's detailed video analyzing various compressors. Does MDE have an oversampling mode and if so, what does that spectrum look like? (I do not have MDE myself.)
Outside of that, I belive that the MDE plugin will not really be giving you what you'd obtain from purely analog circuitry.
For anyone who has the Saturn - do run it the various algorithms through this setup. You will hear very noticeable artifacts during the sweep, unless you have set the quality to High or better, performing oversampling and avoiding these digital reflections. This is also confirmed by the spectral analysis.
Those Byzantine arches may look cool but likely are not - unless you aim for the digital artifacts.
Perhaps the one thing I would wish from the Oscilloscope plugin would be a more fine-grained resolution of the differing volumes on the frequencies. The current scheme based on brightness quite possibly overemphasizes some of the fainter signals. Adding color to this could help improve the resolution.
On the Gearslutz forum the people who run sine sweeps through their plugins into a spectrogram are called the "aliasing police". Some people do it for every plugin and get upset if they find aliasing. I enjoy doing that myself but for me the real indication of a plugin being properly oversampled is when all of the sine-sweep sound you hear coming out the other end of the plugin are rising in pitch. If you hear tones descending when the input frequency is ascending that means there is a real, audible problem with the plugin. On the other hand, if you see some downward sloping lines on the spectrogram but can't hear any downward moving pitches then the aliasing isn't a serious problem.
Now that we have this AU3 spectrogram I am planning to do some aliasing police videos. Not to call out devs who are doing a bad job (I'll try to pick apps that do a good job when I do the video) but just so people know how to test their own plugins.
The MagicDeathEyeStereo image where the logo on the left has a blue/violet color is an indication that it has been set to 4x oversampling, but please understand that it is also overdriving the signal. This is indicated by the reddish color on the gain reduction displays.
Thanks for the details! So the first MDE picture does show that you do get a nice cleanup with the oversampling is in effect.
I would also surmise in the Bark filter picture that the two dark rectangles -and a third, more faintly visible one at the bottom left- do correspond to the triplebands in action. No aliasing - good!
With further experimentation (chasing them MDE harmonics) I do see that @Blue_Mangoo's Gain Stage Vintage Clean must have been created with consideration of spectral analysis in mind (nice job!) and also that in Klevgrand's Reamp all models except for Tube Bass Amp suffer from noticable digital aliasing. I suppose a LPF in the Bass Amp model does the trick here - the oversampling does not help when turned on.
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I am pleased to see the tone boosters do oversampling correctly.
Amazing 😉
Well, there’s this angle on it...
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/13/looted-landmarks-notre-dame-big-ben-st-marks-east-stealing-from-the-saracens
Off topic I know but topical.
Interesting results!
That saturation module in RSS comp 609 looks terrible from an aliasing perspective... Glad to see that other devs have proper antialiasing filters in place :-)
Anyone try some of the other toneboosters plugins (their compressor claims to be ultra clean)?
Seeing similarities in the RRS 609 and MDEstereo “cathedral” forms: are these oddly gorgeous formations representing unwanted aliasing, wanted “character” or both depending on ear / taste?