For instance, I love the sound of the Aggressive character, which has a very quick linear attack curve, combined with the gentle adaptive transfer curve provided by the Soft Knee switch. This was a late design decision made by the team which I was really excited about.Įxposing these features as toggles, instead of hiding them away in the character selection, allows for some really interesting sonic possibilities. In fact, to cram in all the DSP we developed, we had to add in two extra toggle switches which were never in the original design. When we sat down to do this, it turned out we had more than enough to work with. We planned on sorting these DSP add-ons, enhancements, and permutations into groups, to try to build combinations that fit the sonic signatures from our original specification. This is one of the most fun audio engineering/science projects I can imagine, so that was definitely a highlight of the development cycle for me! Basically, I tried to generate a “bag of tricks” of awesome dynamics processing DSP features, from transient enhancement stages to dual interpolated release curves. We also reviewed papers from the academic journals and conference proceedings that cover this sort of thing (AES and DAFx).Įarly in the project, I spent most of my time with ideas based on existing algorithms for attack/release automation and dynamic transfer curve adjustment, as well as different signal processing topologies which affect the overall shape and sound of the limiter’s gain envelope. In order to gather ideas for these processing modes, we researched and analyzed the design of other well-known software dynamics processors. Each character would be suited to a different range of mixing or mastering scenarios. When I started working on the Adaptive Limiter project, the team had already decided that the plugin would have a number of modes of operation, called “characters”. Jon Downing, Cakewalk Software Engineer, reveals some of the DSP design decisions and efforts to create this fantastic new plug-in. The Adaptive Limiter, introduced in the SONAR 2017.05 Update, has been very well received by customers.

Upgrade previous sonar mp3 encoder