Radium Compressor VST plugins

[kmatheussen]

The Radium Compressor is a compressor with a new and intuitive interface.



The recently released standalone jack version of this compressor has already
been included in Fedora 17 and 18 plus several other depositories.

The compressor has unanimously been praised for it's user interface. (but it sounds good too!)

It's so far been available as the built-in compressor in Radium (http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/index.php),
a standalone Jack application (GPL), and as commercial VST and AU plugins for Windows and OSX.

Now it is also available as a commercial VST plugin for Linux:
http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium ... plugin.php

[wolftune]

Hmm. I was ready to be excited, but naw. I thought it might be a FLOSS plugin, LV2 maybe. I understand there's issues about that. It's a nice visualization, but it's still just a compressor. There's FLOSS options, and if I can spend some extra $, it's going to be a donation to people who are developing FLOSS, not proprietary stuff.

Anyway, reminds me of this very interesting, actually much more remarkable VST plugin:
http://www.rndigital.net/dynamizer-onlinetutorial.html

And anyway, since Windows VSTs work on GNU/Linux, there's lots of other options if I don't care about being FLOSS. So no offense, I understand you want to get paid and don't blame you for that. But I'm working unpaid on a major project specifically to figure out how to get more funding to FLOSS. I hope when that's available, people will be less tempted to do the wrong thing and go proprietary. I know you have mixed feelings anyway, since you're putting out FLOSS yourself.

[kmatheussen]

A commercial VST plugin for Linux...
hmmm.. I don't get it, but it's your project.

It's already available for windows and osx. Would be strange not releasing it for linux.

Which hosts have you tested it in?

Radium, renoise and qtracktor. It's also been downloaded around 400 times for windows, and around
100 times for mac. Haven't got any reports (public forums or private) about it being unstable.

Thanks for the crash report. The first one is not very important, could just as well be a bug in juce (can't reproduce it though).
The second one looks serious, but I can't reproduce it. Is the source for your plugin tester available?

EDIT: I can actually reproduce it. Fixing it now.
I didn't "make clean" on juce files between making mono and stereo, so the juce library operated in
mono, while the plugin operated in stereo.

[kmatheussen]

Hmm. I was ready to be excited, but naw. I thought it might be a FLOSS plugin, LV2 maybe. I understand there's issues about that. It's a nice visualization, but it's still just a compressor. There's FLOSS options, and if I can spend some extra $, it's going to be a donation to people who are developing FLOSS, not proprietary stuff.

Most of the source is available in Radium and the standalone jack application for the compressor.
I also want to make the source available for the VST/AU plugin, I'm just not sure about license yet. I want to avoid the
situation where anyone can sell or distribute the program legally, someone could even pretend they did the program themselves.

But it also depends how commercially successful the plugin will be. If no one buys it for a very long time,
and it's unlikely than anyone will in the future, I'll release it as GPL. Only exception is of course the RTAS-version,
which is not compatible with GPL.

Anyway, reminds me of this very interesting, actually much more remarkable VST plugin:
http://www.rndigital.net/dynamizer-onlinetutorial.html

Yes, it shares some visual similarites with this plugin (and Neodynium), but the radium
compressor is just a normal compressor (audio-vice) with a more intuitive interface.
When you try it, you see the difference.

And anyway, since Windows VSTs work on GNU/Linux, there's lots of other options if I don't care about being FLOSS. So no offense, I understand you want to get paid and don't blame you for that. But I'm working unpaid on a major project specifically to figure out how to get more funding to FLOSS. I hope when that's available, people will be less tempted to do the wrong thing and go proprietary. I know you have mixed feelings anyway, since you're putting out FLOSS yourself.

It's partly to get paid (me and Notam (http://www.notam02.no)), but it's also to get attention to Radium. Radium is GPL, and will always be GPL.
Radium compressor will most likely be GPL some day as well, but I'm not sure if GPL is a good business model
right now for this particular program. The RTAS version (not released yet) is also incompatible with GPL
because of the SDK license from avid. One of the reasons for making this plugin is to make an RTAS version
we can use in the studios at Notam (the studio engineer really loves this plugin), and to do that that we have to
buy a juce license in order to do things legally. So we've also had actual expenses (not just manpower) making the plugin.

[kmatheussen]

The code for the test tool is here:
https://github.com/falkTX/Carla/tree/ma ... /discovery
(clone the repo and run "make discovery" to build just that)

Thank you, that sounds very useful.

Now, I want to ask, what was the real reason for moving the plugin UI to Juce?
I assume single code for VST + RTAS version?

Yes, both RTAS and AU were reasons enough to use Juce.
But before that I did try to use Qt. On Linux, I got it working,
and I also think I got it working on OSX and windows when the host was
running Qt. But anything else failed, and after a while I found out that
I had spent more time on this than translating the GUI to juce in the first place.

I'm working on a solution to build Qt-based plugins as DSSI+LV2+VST in one single source, just like Juce does.
I can't do RTAS because I don't have access to the SDK myself, but apart from that, perhaps this is something you'd be interested in?
In any case, the "toolkit" base code is here: https://github.com/falkTX/Carla/tree/ma ... bs/distrho
And a work-in-progress demo plugin here: https://github.com/falkTX/Carla/tree/ma ... ive/notes/
(There's not any docs yet, sorry about that)

That sounds like a great project, but it's not something I need, I think.
The GUI of the Qt version is much quicker than the Juce version, but apart
from that I don't see a big reason to switch.

EDIT: btw, I have a working (although experimental) LV2 wrapper for juce:
https://github.com/falkTX/DISTRHO/tree/ ... s/juce-lv2
You just need to define a few macros to activate needed LV2 features

I'll definitely look at that. Thanks for the tip!

[kmatheussen]

And anyway, since Windows VSTs work on GNU/Linux, there's lots of other options if I don't care about being FLOSS. So no offense, I understand you want to get paid and don't blame you for that. But I'm working unpaid on a major project specifically to figure out how to get more funding to FLOSS. I hope when that's available, people will be less tempted to do the wrong thing and go proprietary. I know you have mixed feelings anyway, since you're putting out FLOSS yourself.

By the way, since you are working with licensing, perhaps you know of an existing license which allows me
to distribute the source, but disallow other people to spread binaries based on the source, without my permission?

[wolftune]

Most of the source is available in Radium and the standalone jack application for the compressor.
I also want to make the source available for the VST/AU plugin, I'm just not sure about license yet. I want to avoid the
situation where anyone can sell or distribute the program legally, someone could even pretend they did the program themselves.

This shows a misunderstanding of licenses. Plagiarism is fraud and has nothing to do with FLOSS licenses. The GPL does not include a permission to lie, to claim credit for someone else's work. The fact that it has no strong attribution requirement is not related. I could just as well take your proprietary binary and tell someone that I made it, and this too would be fraudulent. Choosing to be closed doesn't relate to this. And all of this is dependent on your willingness to enforce it anyway, to actually go and do something if someone is fraudulent or ignoring your license. It is a common but mistaken idea that plagiarism is related to FLOSS.

As to the compatibility with RTAS, that's irrelevant. You can use as many licenses as you like. You can release non-RTAS versions as GPL. You don't have to abide by your own license! You are the copyright holder! Until/unless you are using someone else's contributions, you can use as many licenses as you want and do anything you want with your own stuff.

As far as distributing source but blocking binaries, there's no issue. Yes, there are many licenses. But you could just write your own thing that says, "All Rights Reserved" and also give people the source. Legally, if you give me the source, you can use no license at all and I am legally barred from distributing the source to anyone else. Practically, however, I could distribute it, just like people actually do share things illegally. You could have some honor statement, which often actually does make a difference, or you could do something to enforce your copyright. In the end, no matter what you do, people who don't care about the law may ignore your wishes, even with the plain binary. The purpose of FLOSS is to grant honorable people the freedoms of Free Software and thus be fair to the community (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html )

So I don't have a specific suggestion about license for you. I encourage GPL-compatible licenses. But there are definitely licenses that do what you want.

and to both you and falkTX: stop using the term "commercial" to contrast with FLOSS. The GPL and all other approved FLOSS licenses permit commercial use and do nothing anti-commercial. You are free to sell and do commercial things with GPL software. The terms for non-FLOSS is "proprietary" or "non-free".

Cheers,

[kmatheussen]

Most of the source is available in Radium and the standalone jack application for the compressor.
I also want to make the source available for the VST/AU plugin, I'm just not sure about license yet. I want to avoid the
situation where anyone can sell or distribute the program legally, someone could even pretend they did the program themselves.

This shows a misunderstanding of licenses. Plagiarism is fraud and has nothing to do with FLOSS licenses. The GPL does not include a permission to lie, to claim credit for someone else's work. The fact that it has no strong attribution requirement is not related. I could just as well take your proprietary binary and tell someone that I made it, and this too would be fraudulent. Choosing to be closed doesn't relate to this. And all of this is dependent on your willingness to enforce it anyway, to actually go and do something if someone is fraudulent or ignoring your license. It is a common but mistaken idea that plagiarism is related to FLOSS.

I know this. I meant forking the radium compressor, and not being very informative where the original came from.
But this is a minor issue. The important thing is to prevent anyone else from distributing binaries.

As to the compatibility with RTAS, that's irrelevant. You can use as many licenses as you like. You can release non-RTAS versions as GPL. You don't have to abide by your own license! You are the copyright holder! Until/unless you are using someone else's contributions, you can use as many licenses as you want and do anything you want with your own stuff.

As far as distributing source but blocking binaries, there's no issue. Yes, there are many licenses. But you could just write your own thing that says, "All Rights Reserved" and also give people the source. Legally, if you give me the source, you can use no license at all and I am legally barred from distributing the source to anyone else. Practically, however, I could distribute it, just like people actually do share things illegally. You could have some honor statement, which often actually does make a difference, or you could do something to enforce your copyright. In the end, no matter what you do, people who don't care about the law may ignore your wishes, even with the plain binary. The purpose of FLOSS is to grant honorable people the freedoms of Free Software and thus be fair to the community (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html )

So I don't have a specific suggestion about license for you. I encourage GPL-compatible licenses. But there are definitely licenses that do what you want.

and to both you and falkTX: stop using the term "commercial" to contrast with FLOSS. The GPL and all other approved FLOSS licenses permit commercial use and do nothing anti-commercial. You are free to sell and do commercial things with GPL software. The terms for non-FLOSS is "proprietary" or "non-free".

Cheers,

I know this too, I think most people (EDIT: I meant developers) do, and I'm pretty sure no one meant to imply there were some contradiction between GPL and being commercial.

[Pablo]

By the way, since you are working with licensing, perhaps you know of an existing license which allows me
to distribute the source, but disallow other people to spread binaries based on the source, without my permission?

Have yo read gnuplot's license?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuplot
http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnup ... /Copyright

kmatheussen, you wrote jack_capture, no? Thanks a lot!

[dednikko]

Is the compressor ratio able to be set to infinity? I have been looking for a plugin that will allow me to do crazier parallel compression tricks.

I really like the compressor's features and interface. Unfortunately I won't use it until it becomes available as an LV2 plugin. I use Mixbus and Ardour, so I need it to be available in those hosts before I pay for it. I am definitely willing to pay though, as I use LinuxDSP and Loomer plugins. I only bought the Loomer stuff because they have promised that all their products are being made available as LV2 soon, and at no additional charge.

[linuxdsp]

I hope this isn't going to turn into another discussion about free (open source) vs proprietary software, but as a commercial (and I use the word because it implies a business that makes a profit, not a distinction between FOSS or proprietary) I have some experience of the different business models and I think there is a place for both options in linux.

1. If you make a decision to produce commercial software, the expenses involved (in making a good enough quality) product go up exponentially. It is no longer a case of just typing something into a computer you might have bought anyway, and then putting it on a free webhost and saying 'well it works fine for me...' FOSS projects can become abandonware just like proprietary (there isn't always someone willing to take on a project and if your work / business depends on it and you are not a programmer you are accepting the risk that you may be left out in the cold when it stops working, by a developer who has no incentive because there is no financial benefit).

2. If you produce proprietary software you are saying 'pay me for the time and money it costs to develop and test this, and I will take some of that risk away, because I have a financial incentive to maintain the product because if I don't,I don't get to eat..
At that point as a commercial venture, it then becomes necessary to comply with many rules and regulations (especially if you also support other proprietary plaforms).

There are risks involved for the user, whichever route they take, but that's what choice is about.

3. The GPL does permit commercial distribution, and the word 'free' in FOSS is (perhaps intentionally) ambiguous because it doesn't mean 'gratis' - however, if your only product is the software, and you make the source available without restriction on re-distribution (with attribution) then someone can and will (legally) offer a free (no cost) version. So in that sense, 'free' and 'free' - whichever definition - amount to the same thing. In a purely commercial sense, by making it 'free' in any sense of the word, it could be argued that, by definition, you are saying "I attach no value to this". Which is not a viable business model.

For the record, none of my software contains GPL'd code, and I also contribute to GPL projects, both financially and with code where and when it is useful. As a linux user I wanted to create some high quality tools, which I would also use.. as a user. One plugin will average something like 20,000 lines of code (some reusable) and takes 1 - 2 months research and development. In addition, UI graphics have to be designed etc.

I have great respect for what FOSS stands for and what it has achieved, but I cannot cover the cost of developing and testing /maintaining / distributing / advertising software without charging for it. Whether people chose to pay, is of course a matter of choice, but I think proprietary / commercial can and should co-exist with FOSS without a problem (it did and still does on other platforms, before linux)

This looks like an interesting compressor, I hope it is a successful product (free or otherwise).

[wolftune]

making it 'free' in any sense of the word, it could be argued that, by definition, you are saying "I attach no value to this".

Sure, but the fact that the argument could be made doesn't stop it from being completely bullshit.

freevsvalue

valuelove.png (107.58 KiB) Viewed 1561 times

But, linuxdsp, the fact that value in a general sense is very much *not* strictly about price doesn't remove any of the other points you make, which are more valid. I am working to solve the dilemma of getting people to pay for Free/Libre stuff, but at this point, you are totally fair to say that there is a conundrum. You are right that being proprietary is a way to achieve commercial success, to get people to pay, and you are also right that getting people to pay is often necessary. I hope you also admit / agree that this situation is unfortunate. Choosing to be proprietary has a lot of negative consequences that are side-effects, consequences which do not relate to the goal of getting paid. But as long as there's no obvious answer, I don't want to demonize anyone for making an uncomfortable choice one way or the other. I do want to encourage everyone to be honest with this and realize the ramifications of their choice. And I encourage people to prioritize funding and support of those who choose the Free/Libre option.

Respectfully,
Aaron

[linuxdsp]

@wolftune:

making it 'free' in any sense of the word, it could be argued that, by definition, you are saying "I attach no value to this".

perhaps more correctly, I should have said (in the context of my original post) "I attach no commercial value to this"

.. you are totally fair to say that there is a conundrum.. ..you are also right that getting people to pay is often necessary. I hope you also admit / agree that this situation is unfortunate.

If you mean it's unfortunate that 'free' as in freedom is at odds with the ability to make / distribute commercial software then generally yes I do agree. But its not really a case of "getting" people to pay, as that implies no choice. The reality is that there are different options with different benefits / risks. And asking people to pay for skilled work is a fundamental premise of our economy. It would be unfair and unrealistic to expect one group of skilled people to work for nothing, I assume you don't work for free, and I wouldn't expect others to (unless from choice).

Personally, I prefer that we have free / open standards even if there can't always be an ideal of free software, that way, at least anything I create - my data - with a proprietary piece of software is not (as a commercially useful side-effect) encrypted into some proprietary format which only that application can read.

And as I mentioned before, I hope this product is successful, and does well, whether its free or not

[wolftune]

@linuxdsp, I agree overall. The point is: the economics are complex. In principle, there's no reason that it should bring you more income to have fewer people use your software. By creating artificial scarcity via restring access until payment, you reduce the access and thus get paid. Thus, you provide less to the world yet get paid more. However, if providing free access meant not getting paid so much, then it would make the product impossible or inferior, and thus that isn't working either! The point is that this situation stinks. It is absurd that the products of less value in terms of usefulness (i.e. proprietary products) get valued more in the commercial market. But the way our market economy works, this is the case. That stinks. So I don't blame you for the decision you've made for how to deal with it, but this isn't the way things ought to be, ideally.

And for reference, it is clear to me that lots of people do work for free essentially, and this is not by choice. FalkTX doesn't put out KXStudio freely because he chooses not to get paid. The choice he wants is to put things out freely and get paid. The obnoxious economic status quo instead pits these two choices against each other in some ways. So, I have decided to do a lot of work for free myself (I have a very modest income teaching music lessons otherwise) in order to develop a system where people can get what is actually just: pay without artificial proprietary restrictions. And if I'm successful, then you won't have any more excuse for staying proprietary. But actions speak louder than words, so you'll have to wait and see if I can achieve what I'm proposing.

For the time being, all I'm suggesting is for people to stop saying that proprietary software is good or has its place, unless you clarify that it has its place solely as a mechanism to get paid. If the pay part wasn't in the equation, all the other reasons to stay proprietary are unethical.

And what all this means is one thing (and I will shut up about this having said this conclusion): the defense of proprietary depends exclusively on the assumption that it pays better, and this must be clear because whenever this assumption doesn't hold, then there's no good defense of proprietary any more.

Respectfully,
Aaron

[GMaq]

Is the compressor ratio able to be set to infinity? I have been looking for a plugin that will allow me to do crazier parallel compression tricks.

I really like the compressor's features and interface. Unfortunately I won't use it until it becomes available as an LV2 plugin. I use Mixbus and Ardour, so I need it to be available in those hosts before I pay for it. I am definitely willing to pay though, as I use LinuxDSP and Loomer plugins. I only bought the Loomer stuff because they have promised that all their products are being made available as LV2 soon, and at no additional charge.

Ardour 3 is almost here and fully supports LinuxVST plugins (thanks to linuxDSP BTW) if the developer doesn't do an LV2 version. However for the time being you will be out of luck with Mixbus...