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funkmuscle
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Post by funkmuscle »

Voxengo Span, do we have anything for Linux like that? I mean where you can actually adjust the view instead of it looking like lightning? I am in a room where it's horrible for mixing and I cannot afford treatment or fancy speakers and to be honest, it's the final product is all that matters. The road on getting to the final product in my case doesn't matter. I'm saying all this because somebody will say why don't you just use your ears but I cannot and since I tried using Span via yabridge, My mixes automatically started to translate better on everything. Still sounds horrible in the room but take it to the car or Chromecast to the TV or through the laptop speakers or my cell phone it sounds great.

The thing is it could be me but I cannot get it to function the way I see in tutorial videos so I was hoping that we had a native plugin that can do all that it's doing?

I just can't work with that lightning thing and I have no clue where it looks like something with different colours or one of those spectralizers I guess they are called

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Re: span

Post by sysrqer »

Do you need the multi channels overlaid in one graph function? I think LSP's spectrum analyser can do that, and there is EasySSP as well.

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Re: span

Post by Death »

Sorry, not the answer you're looking for but I also mix in a crap room and I have some really nice open-back headphones (Beyerdynamic DT880) for mixing with which I trust way more than my monitors due to the room situation. The monitors are a bit more useful for the stereofield though and also give me less ear fatigue then headphones so I use them most of the time and then just do checks & adjustments with the headphones. Also, try shoving some cushions behind your monitors as a cheap way of sound treatment cos it'll help dampen them low frequencies a bit.

I actually use SPAN on the mastering preset and it's great. I'll stay tuned here to learn about the Linux alternatives though.

Good luck finding something :wink:

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Re: span

Post by Impostor »

Death wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 4:14 pm

The monitors are a bit more useful for the stereofield though and also give me less ear fatigue then headphones so I use them most of the time and then just do checks & adjustments with the headphones.

Maybe a stereo-to-binaural plugin, bs2b.so or equivalent, can help for the stereo image on headphones?

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Re: span

Post by funkmuscle »

Death wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 4:14 pm

Sorry, not the answer you're looking for but I also mix in a crap room and I have some really nice open-back headphones (Beyerdynamic DT880) for mixing with which I trust way more than my monitors due to the room situation. The monitors are a bit more useful for the stereofield though and also give me less ear fatigue then headphones so I use them most of the time and then just do checks & adjustments with the headphones. Also, try shoving some cushions behind your monitors as a cheap way of sound treatment cos it'll help dampen them low frequencies a bit.

I actually use SPAN on the mastering preset and it's great. I'll stay tuned here to learn about the Linux alternatives though.

Good luck finding something :wink:

I hear you about the cushions and all that but my situation I cannot do anything like that at all. I have open back or semi open back AKGs and I use Sonar works reference ID software but still needed a little extra and that's where span came in handy.

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Re: span

Post by funkmuscle »

Impostor wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 4:41 pm
Death wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 4:14 pm

The monitors are a bit more useful for the stereofield though and also give me less ear fatigue then headphones so I use them most of the time and then just do checks & adjustments with the headphones.

Maybe a stereo-to-binaural plugin, bs2b.so or equivalent, can help for the stereo image on headphones?

I've tried all that and air windows has plugins call monitoring but by the time I dance around all that, the ear fatigue after 20 minutes, I just find myself doing more work trying to figure out the proper settings instead of mixing. I've given up on the listening part more and I'm focusing on visual and hearing at the same time and as I mentioned I'm getting the best results that way. Nothing worse than thinking you've got the mix and you live in the penthouse in your building and you got to run all the way to the underground to slip it into your car only to be disappointed that you feel like just tossing everything out the window. I guess I'm singing to the choir here because everybody that has tried mixing would have experienced that kind of BS.

My band is trying to release some stuff on Spotify and am the final destination here because we don't have money to pay to have someone mix our stuff plus I've always wanted to learn but that learning curve will have to wait until we put something out because the rest of the boys are getting quite anxious and waiting on me.

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Re: span

Post by Impostor »

funkmuscle wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 4:52 pm

I guess I'm singing to the choir here because everybody that has tried mixing would have experienced that kind of BS.

Sounds very familiar indeed. I mix almost exclusively on headphones, and I dread the speaker test blues so much I simply don't do it anymore.

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Re: span

Post by Death »

Well, some graphical EQs can actually make decent spectral analysers. But have you tried checking these websites for plugin ideas?:

  1. https://linuxdaw.org/?q=spectrum
  2. https://linuxmusic.rocks/category/meter-analyser
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Re: span

Post by funkmuscle »

Thanks guys. The thing would span does which I can't find from the others is to show you the balance between the mids and the sides. That is where my problem is no matter what I do it's either too boomy or too harsh but with span I can see it. The thing is span working on Mac or Windows you can set it up to check every track or bus so that way you don't have to go through the painsaking editing of trying to figure out every track especially if you have something like 30 tracks.

The key thing for me is the comparison of the mids and the sides. That just gave me an idea to use LSP midside EQ as just a spectrum. I will give that one a shot.

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Re: span

Post by Death »

Are you referring to the correlation meter?

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Re: span

Post by elcalen »

One thing to keep in mind with spectrum analysers is the slope setting. I believe that Span defaults to a 4.5dB/octave slope, which compensates for the natural way we perceive higher frequencies as louder. If you use an analyser with a straight 0dB slope, the curve is going to look a lot more bottom-heavy. And a lot of EQs don't necessarily have adjustable slope settings.

And yeah, a really good native Linux spectrum analyser is something we're definitely missing. I think the best option currently is probably LSP's analyser, but to me it feels a little clunky and lacks some features I'd like. I'm a REAPER user myself, though, and there we have access to a couple fairly decent community made JSFX plugins, but alas, those aren't really useable elsewhere...

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Re: span

Post by funkmuscle »

elcalen wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 8:10 am

One thing to keep in mind with spectrum analysers is the slope setting. I believe that Span defaults to a 4.5dB/octave slope, which compensates for the natural way we perceive higher frequencies as louder. If you use an analyser with a straight 0dB slope, the curve is going to look a lot more bottom-heavy. And a lot of EQs don't necessarily have adjustable slope settings.

And yeah, a really good native Linux spectrum analyser is something we're definitely missing. I think the best option currently is probably LSP's analyser, but to me it feels a little clunky and lacks some features I'd like. I'm a REAPER user myself, though, and there we have access to a couple fairly decent community made JSFX plugins, but alas, those aren't really useable elsewhere...

Yes because the majority of us are bedroom producers engineers and so on and a lot of us don't have the money to properly treat the room and even things like sonarworks drops their support for our platform because the guy that first introduced himself here to us quits. They said if they could get someone to work on that side they will continue supporting our platform but unfortunately they don't and still even with that reference software, it's still not enough..

So yes we need some really good analyzers for our platform. I use Reaper too but just for recording but with the YSFX, I can run Reaper plugins so I will check those out to see what they have.

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Re: span

Post by LAM »

funkmuscle wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 3:53 pm

Voxengo Span, do we have anything for Linux like that? I mean where you can actually adjust the view instead of it looking like lightning?

A similar setup can be achieved with:
Spectacle: https://github.com/jpcima/spectacle
or any other configurable spectrum analyzer, like LSP, as previously suggested
+
JKmeter, probably already in your distro's repo
or x42 meter collection: https://x42-plugins.com/x42/x42-meters
or Kmeter: https://github.com/mzuther/K-Meter
among others.

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Re: span

Post by elcalen »

LAM wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 5:02 pm

A similar setup can be achieved with:
Spectacle: https://github.com/jpcima/spectacle
or any other configurable spectrum analyzer, like LSP, as previously suggested

I'd never heard of Spectacle before! But based on what's listed in the readme, it doesn't actually look very configurable... It doesn't look like it has mid/side analysis, for one thing, which was something that funkmuscle mentioned. (Neither does LSP, afaik.) I also don't see any mention of slope adjustment, which imho is very useful for mastering purposes.

funkmuscle wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 4:13 pm

I use Reaper too but just for recording but with the YSFX, I can run Reaper plugins so I will check those out to see what they have.

The analyser I've been using in REAPER lately is ReSpectrum by nitsuj, it can be found on the REAPER forums. (It's a companion to his ReEQ equaliser, which is also really nice, but sadly too cpu-hungry for my use.)

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Re: span

Post by LAM »

elcalen wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 6:05 pm

I'd never heard of Spectacle before! But based on what's listed in the readme, it doesn't actually look very configurable... It doesn't look like it has mid/side analysis, for one thing, which was something that funkmuscle mentioned. (Neither does LSP, afaik.) I also don't see any mention of slope adjustment, which imho is very useful for mastering purposes.

Yes no MidSide and no slope, can configure STFT and other parameters though.

One plugin that can show MidSide spectrum is LSP Graphic Equalizer MidSide

elcalen wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 6:05 pm

The analyser I've been using in REAPER lately is ReSpectrum by nitsuj, it can be found on the REAPER forums. (It's a companion to his ReEQ equaliser, which is also really nice, but sadly too cpu-hungry for my use.)

Tried it in YSFX, looks good and has interesting features, but alone, at least it was not obvious to me how to show it, it doesn't have a meter nor correlation meter.

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