[LAD] A small article about tools for electronic musicians

[Tim E. Real]

On May 2, 2010 02:39:23 am you wrote:
> Jan Marguc wrote:
> >     Sadly, I just found out the hard way that it has a really nasty
> >      denormalization problem. It's so bad I may not be able to use it
> >     any more.
> >     People have tried fancy anti-denormalization plugins ahead of it,
> >     with no
> >      luck, apparently.
> >
> >     MusE has a basic DC anti-denormalization feature, and it didn't help.
> >
> >
> > I completely agree with you: The JCM900 VST rocks! I've been using it
> > a lot on Windows, now I'm on the Mac, so I haven't used it in a while.
> > Too bad the source code for these plugins is not available. The papers
> > on the website only explain the basic principles.
> > Anyway, I also ran into the denormalization problem quickly, so I just
> > made a small VST that mixes some -100 dB white noise into the signal.
>
> Wouldn't Jack's -z option solve this issue too?
>
> $ jackd -d alsa --help | grep dither
>     -z, --dither     Dithering mode (default: n)
I think in our case that's not necessarily true.
The source of the playing audio data into the plugins can be from a 
 wave file track. When the app has played past the wave file 'part' 
 (part of a longer song) and there's no more data to come from 
 from the part, we 'artificially' insert float 0.0 data instead 
 (or the fixed denormalize value of 1E-18, if turned on).
There, the data doesn't come from Jack, so I don't know if dithering
 would help. It might only help with our 'Audio Input' track type.

I kinda went way off the subject line, eh? Didn't mean to hijack.
Sometimes specific questions branch out.
It's all related, in a way... 

Tim.

>
> > Actually, I made the noise gain adjustable, because the added noise
> > made my synth-guitars sound much more authentic. ;-)
> > Alternatively one could make it more convenient to use by creating a
> > separate wrapper .dll that loads the JCM900 and just intercepts the
> > process-calls, while passing any other call to the plugin.
> >
> > Jan