Dragonfly Reverb 4 early release
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 5:03 am
Yes, it's true, I still can't stop myself from tinkering with reverb plugins. Early this year I found myself dissatisfied with some of the decisions I made in earlier versions of Dragonfly Reverb, and found myself wondering, "How would I do this if I could start all over again and not worry about backward compatibility?"
Here is an early alpha release of Dragonfly Reverb 4:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9i7tad16vteke ... a-0002.tgz
Before this, I mostly just made a wrapper around the Freeverb3 library, kind of like taking an existing combustion engine and building a custom car around it. I didn't really know what was going on inside the engine. This time, I am pulling the engine apart and rebuilding it one piece at a time, while trying to understand what the pieces do.
Some of the ideas:
[*] Instead of being tied down to one or two specific algorithms (for example, Dragonfly Room used Moorer's Early Reflections + Datorro's Progenitor), Dragonfly Reverb 4 allows you to pick any two algorithms. So you can still do Early + Room or Early + Hall, or you could feed a plate into a room, or stack two early reflections, or do a plate + early, or whatever.
[*] The gain sliders are measured in decibels instead of percentages
[*] Most of the frequency dials give you full range of 20kHz instead of being more constrained
[*] I didn't like how some of the parameters in the room algorithm worked, so I'm altering them in this implementation - specifically, I'm experimenting with the spin/wander parameters, making them work more like the hall algorithm, and I'm still deciding if the "bass boost" makes any sense.
[*] In Dragonfly Reverb 3, I added an extra low pass filter to the Plate algorithm because I didn't know what I was doing. Plates are supposed to be more bright than that, so you may notice that the plate in Dragonfly Reverb 4 lets the high frequencies ring out more.
[*] Eventually I might try building in additional effects, like shimmer and/or spring reverb.
Lots of stuff still missing, but enough works to give you an idea of what I'm going for.
What works: Early Reflections, Plate, and Room algorithms. Most of the dials actually do something, wet/dry mix works... maybe some other stuff
Still missing: Hall doesn't do anything yet, there is a place for the spectrogram but it isn't implemented, there are no presets yet. Some of the dials in the room algorithm don't do anything. The GUI layout is still really sloppy, I threw it together just enough to start playing with the algorithms. I'll get back to cleaning it up one of these days. Oh, and CPU usage hasn't been optimized at all, so you can expect the early alpha releases to have a high DSP load.
Here is an early alpha release of Dragonfly Reverb 4:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9i7tad16vteke ... a-0002.tgz
Before this, I mostly just made a wrapper around the Freeverb3 library, kind of like taking an existing combustion engine and building a custom car around it. I didn't really know what was going on inside the engine. This time, I am pulling the engine apart and rebuilding it one piece at a time, while trying to understand what the pieces do.
Some of the ideas:
[*] Instead of being tied down to one or two specific algorithms (for example, Dragonfly Room used Moorer's Early Reflections + Datorro's Progenitor), Dragonfly Reverb 4 allows you to pick any two algorithms. So you can still do Early + Room or Early + Hall, or you could feed a plate into a room, or stack two early reflections, or do a plate + early, or whatever.
[*] The gain sliders are measured in decibels instead of percentages
[*] Most of the frequency dials give you full range of 20kHz instead of being more constrained
[*] I didn't like how some of the parameters in the room algorithm worked, so I'm altering them in this implementation - specifically, I'm experimenting with the spin/wander parameters, making them work more like the hall algorithm, and I'm still deciding if the "bass boost" makes any sense.
[*] In Dragonfly Reverb 3, I added an extra low pass filter to the Plate algorithm because I didn't know what I was doing. Plates are supposed to be more bright than that, so you may notice that the plate in Dragonfly Reverb 4 lets the high frequencies ring out more.
[*] Eventually I might try building in additional effects, like shimmer and/or spring reverb.
Lots of stuff still missing, but enough works to give you an idea of what I'm going for.
What works: Early Reflections, Plate, and Room algorithms. Most of the dials actually do something, wet/dry mix works... maybe some other stuff
Still missing: Hall doesn't do anything yet, there is a place for the spectrogram but it isn't implemented, there are no presets yet. Some of the dials in the room algorithm don't do anything. The GUI layout is still really sloppy, I threw it together just enough to start playing with the algorithms. I'll get back to cleaning it up one of these days. Oh, and CPU usage hasn't been optimized at all, so you can expect the early alpha releases to have a high DSP load.