I wish all plug-ins would have this - especially compressors and modulation effects…
I’d really like to be able to take the control rate up to sample rate - even if it was processor hungry, it would be useful for rendering… If you’ve ever used a good digital h/w compressor, there’s so many more creative effects you can get from them with the higher control rates, from reshaping transients to the distortion you get from using really short release times…
Also suggest the attack time goes up to at least 60ms.
well, control rate is basically how often a process updates its own settings… so in a high quality digital compressor, every sample: looks at the input signal, measures how far above/below threshold it is, applies the compression ratio, produces a control signal based on the attack and release settings, and applies this transformation to the signal
to get these effects running on consumer-grade processors, they usually cut down on the maths by being block processed… so the compressor might look at the input signal and work out a control signal, then apply that transformation to a run of samples - so rather than updating the gain reduction for every sample, it might only be doing it for every 16 samples
it’s probably more noticable in effects like chorus and pitch shifting, but it becomes very noticable with compressors at more extreme settings, like where you’re using attack and release settings to reshape sounds, or where you’re compressing something heavily and want a pumping or squashed effect… you can also have a degree of inertia on the gain reduction, to give you more character, so the compressor swings and pumps more
i think if Renoise plug-ins could provide control rates up to sample rate, you’d never touch anything Waves or Sonalksis again
Not really, the real rate is per sample when smoothing (parameter ramping) is involved. Else for example volume/pan changes would horribly click and pop. But you are right, that you currently can only specify “destination” values on a tick rate.
it’s not really automatable parameters i’m on about, it’s more the internal parameters which modulate delays/phase for modulation effects, or create a control signal for the compressor… for example, when you compress something heavily and put the attack and release right down as low as they’ll go, you should hear audible distortion as the compressor flattens out individual waves
experimenting with lengthier attacks and heavy compression, you should get a sharp transient emphasizing effect
Waves plug-ins do a reasonable job of giving you a bit of creativity with transient reshaping; most plug-ins don’t; but an Eventide gives you a much wider scope of compression effects, and you can get much fuller sounding results - to the point of soft/hard-clipping distortion from compressing waves too fast… and that’s just a simple DSP compressor when you look at the patch routing… it would be a huge step up if i could get that kind of compression in software
my favourite s/w compressor is probably Nebula 3’s Avalon preset, but that’s only updating (i think) 400 times a second tops in real-time