Polarity-MD - Free 4-band OTT Multiband Compressor for all Systems

[00:00:00] Today I want to show you a new plug-in that I just made and I'm working on this for a
[00:00:04] few weeks now.
[00:00:06] It's called Polarity MD and polarity that's me of course and MD stands for Mutiband Dynamics.
[00:00:13] So this is a four band dynamics with upwards downwards compression per band, of course,
[00:00:18] and clipping.
[00:00:19] And it works on every major system with all kinds of formats VSC3, CLAP and LV2 later on.
[00:00:27] It's coming, I already compiled it on my Mint system.
[00:00:32] So yeah, this is basically a four band OTT and we also have additionally on top on the
[00:00:40] input signal also here and clipper and the compressor upwards downwards and also a clipper
[00:00:45] on the output upwards downwards.
[00:00:49] And then we have four bands instead of three bands for an OTT.
[00:00:53] So on each band we have then additionally also a clipper and upwards downwards compression.
[00:00:58] So you can make stuff really loud, really easily, yeah, and it's completely free.
[00:01:06] You don't need an account, no telemetry, no iLog, brocks and all major platforms, WinMAC
[00:01:11] or Salinux, all formats VSC3, CLAP, LV2.
[00:01:16] So that's the plan.
[00:01:17] I put you the link in the description below and then you can download here the binaries
[00:01:21] and it's in beta at the moment.
[00:01:23] So you can try this out and please give me feedback.
[00:01:27] Of course, if you run into some bugs and I will fix it over the next coming few weeks.
[00:01:35] And this will stay for free for ever.
[00:01:38] So this is not like going away or anything like this.
[00:01:40] You can download this always and I try to make it as good and as pleasing as possible.
[00:01:46] Okay.
[00:01:47] So this is the website link is in the description below and I want to show you of course how
[00:01:51] it sounds here in Bitwig, this is how it looks like.
[00:01:54] And in the back end, it's completely C++ and it's based on juice.
[00:02:00] So it should work pretty well actually on all systems.
[00:02:04] And the front end or the GUI is actually in HTML and CSS.
[00:02:11] So this, of course, sounds a bit weird, but it's also pretty dope because it box on all
[00:02:18] systems out of the box.
[00:02:19] You don't need to have some kind of specific GUI framework to make it work on all systems.
[00:02:29] Here I just use HTML and CSS and it works perfectly fine.
[00:02:34] So in the background, I have a drum bass track here.
[00:02:36] This is on the drum bus more or less.
[00:02:52] And you can already see here, this is the incoming signal.
[00:02:55] It's called pre.
[00:02:56] So this is the full range signal or frequencies coming into the plugin.
[00:03:01] And you have here an input knob where you can change the input gain and push this more
[00:03:09] or less into the clipper here.
[00:03:11] The clipper is at 0 dB.
[00:03:13] So it clips everything away and you can see that it clips when you have here this red line
[00:03:18] going on.
[00:03:20] This is clipping.
[00:03:22] And if you don't like to see here this red line and you want to hear it, you can also
[00:03:28] now click here on this clipping indicator, which shows you more or less with the level
[00:03:33] how much you clip.
[00:03:34] So when we clip this here a lot, you can see a lot of red coming in.
[00:03:41] But you can also just click this and then you hear a delta signal.
[00:03:45] So instead of relying on these visuals here, you can just hear it.
[00:04:03] And this delta signal is then passed directly to the output.
[00:04:07] So it's not going through all of these individual splitters here.
[00:04:11] It's going directly to the output so you can always hear how the delta signal sounds loud
[00:04:18] on each band or on each process.
[00:04:25] So we can already here clip the signal a little bit and then we have here also downwards compression.
[00:04:30] We can pull this down.
[00:04:32] You can see in yellow here how much it actually compresses the signal if you want to.
[00:04:38] You can also change the upwards threshold.
[00:04:41] You can see in the background here in blue how much the signals actually amplified or
[00:04:48] increased in loudness.
[00:04:52] So it's more or less color coded.
[00:04:55] That's what I want to say.
[00:04:56] So if you see yellow here on the plug-in, it's downward compression.
[00:05:00] If you see this blue stuff, then it's upwards compression.
[00:05:06] If you see red, it's clipping.
[00:05:08] And then we have here the amount knob, which changes the ratio basically of all these compressors
[00:05:15] here of the upwards compression and the downwards compression ratio.
[00:05:19] You can dial in here to 0%.
[00:05:21] We have no ratio at all, so it's more or less the pure input.
[00:05:28] But you can also see here then the upwards compression and downwards compression is applied
[00:05:40] with 100%.
[00:05:43] Then there's here of course a global threshold for the downwards compression and the global
[00:05:48] threshold for the upwards compression.
[00:05:50] If you want to change this here, it's only applied to the four bands, not to the pre
[00:05:56] and post FX here.
[00:05:59] Also downwards compression and we have a time scale.
[00:06:02] This more or less scales the attack and release times all the time.
[00:06:08] You can make it very fast.
[00:06:17] Okay, you can also see here the output.
[00:06:26] The input we have here minus 14 LUFs and output is minus 9 LUFs, so you can also decide how
[00:06:32] much you want to compress something to get your desired target level or whatever.
[00:06:39] We can also change the input here on each band if you want to.
[00:06:43] Maybe we open this up here on the master.
[00:06:47] You can also see here the downwards compression, how much there is compression going down upwards
[00:07:07] compression.
[00:07:08] You can dial in exactly how much compression you want.
[00:07:12] For me I just do it very subtly here.
[00:07:15] I just dial in a lot of amount because you should hear how the effect is, of course,
[00:07:22] but in a real project you don't want to dial in that much compression here.
[00:07:27] You can also see always here how much there is clipping applied and so on.
[00:07:32] I tried to make it as visual pleasing as possible just to give you all the information
[00:07:37] you need to compress your signal.
[00:07:41] This one is best on the master, of course, and on drum buses or if you mix here the drums
[00:07:47] and the bass together, so drum and bass bus, that's where this is probably best put to
[00:07:55] use in my opinion.
[00:07:58] You can also change of course the frequency across all of us if you want to.
[00:08:02] I have here some presets for mastering, we just want a 20Hz, 1K and 5K, even octaves,
[00:08:09] to each octaves as the same content, typical OTT, crossover frequencies 88 and 2.5KHz,
[00:08:18] and then here an additional top band for the heads, something for the drum bus, also reset
[00:08:25] button if you want to reset it to the initial settings, so all kinds of different things.
[00:08:33] Because it's a web page I made it so it's kind of behaving like a web page so if you
[00:08:38] make the smaller you have bigger visuals here, you can scroll.
[00:08:46] Maybe I do it like every other plug-in where you can scale it up or down so it becomes
[00:08:51] bigger or smaller, but for now I think it's pretty fine how it is.
[00:08:59] It's not like completely new plug-in or anything you haven't seen before, but I always wanted
[00:09:06] to have like a 4-band OTT, but also additional clippers on each band.
[00:09:14] Also the background here for the clip clipper, the threshold is always on 0 dB, that's how
[00:09:20] I like it.
[00:09:21] There's actually in the background a control where you can change the clipper threshold,
[00:09:27] but I just kind of made it hidden here in this interface because it became too convoluted
[00:09:35] in having all these knobs all the time, I always thought about removing even more knobs
[00:09:42] and just dial in some good settings because most people just want to put this on a master
[00:09:47] dial in the mount, dial in maybe the scale and then call it day.
[00:09:52] That's what I wanted and I think if you put this here on a track, it should sound okay
[00:09:59] and fine almost from the get-go and it should make things louder and you can see where the
[00:10:06] problems arise, so something here.
[00:10:10] It's not clipping here, it's maybe clipping, so you can see oh there's a lot of content
[00:10:14] here in the mid-range because here it's clipping, here it's not clipping, here's a lot of upwards
[00:10:19] compression applied, here's a lot of upwards compression applied.
[00:10:22] Maybe I want to add more content in this range, so you can also use this as a guide what's
[00:10:30] going on in your track where you need to do some changes in your master or in your mix
[00:10:38] down.
[00:10:40] Like I said, I tried to dial in the best possible default settings for the plug-in, so you just
[00:10:47] put it on and have good outcome, but yeah.
[00:10:54] So this is how it looks like, how it sounds, polarity, empty, completely free, this is
[00:10:59] my stupid face so you know it's my plug-in.
[00:11:13] We don't clip it here.
[00:11:38] Then the output here of course is clipping a lot, so you can basically do clip to zero
[00:11:58] if you want to because we have four bands and just push all these bands into the clipper,
[00:12:04] clip it slightly and then you get a very loud output here.
[00:12:10] As you can see it's minus five loves at the moment because we just pushed each of these
[00:12:15] bands slightly into the clipper.
[00:12:18] Maybe we don't want to clip it too much here in the beginning, yeah you can damage your
[00:12:28] audio track pretty easily, but you can also make it very loud, okay.
[00:12:35] Then dial back the amount here.
[00:12:47] Yeah I just want to show you this, it's in beta at the moment, there are probably some
[00:12:51] bugs I have problems with the macOS build, someone said the macOS build is running,
[00:12:58] clap is not running on macOS, but VST3 is running, but you probably run into signing
[00:13:03] problems maybe because I don't have an Apple developer account, I don't have a Mac book
[00:13:11] at the moment, I compile everything on GitHub, but it kind of works on macOS, VST3 and AU.
[00:13:20] On Windows you can see it's running here, for me pretty nicely, I also tried it out
[00:13:25] on Linux already with VST3 and Clap, which is also running.
[00:13:31] Maybe you have an older Linux build, I don't know what you run, it's probably running well
[00:13:38] on Ubuntu and Mint, I'm using Mint, yeah let me know in my discord if you run into
[00:13:46] some bugs problems or maybe drop it down in the comments down below and we figure it out.
[00:13:52] I want to make it as easy and nice, nicely running as possible on all systems, so hit
[00:13:59] me up with the problems, maybe give me some feature requests, but I want to keep it at
[00:14:06] this kind of feature level, maybe I implement some additional things.
[00:14:11] This clipper here, this was some kind of suggestion from one of my patreons, which I found pretty
[00:14:15] nicely to add, but yeah if you have some more ideas, let me know.
[00:14:22] The interface, I know it's not the most beautiful visuals, but I have a designer running already
[00:14:33] doing some stuff in Figma, so let me know what you think and yeah, that's the plug-in
[00:14:39] called polarity MD, and of course I'm planning to do more plug-ins maybe in the future, but
[00:14:45] this was just a test, I'm working on this for a few weeks now and I want to put it out,
[00:14:50] let me know what you think, that's it for now, thanks for watching, see you in the next
[00:14:54] video, bye.
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