Kramer Master Tape

[James Steele]

Have Kramer Tape working here. So far I tried Open & Wide Master... at least that's the preset name I think. It didn't seem terribly colored, but subtle enough. I just threw it on the master fader. Didn't really have time today for more experimentation. Hey... $29? Might as well.

[Armageddon]

Armageddon, you may have had too much of a good thing on your chain. The Kramer replaces a bus comp for me. I love Ozone at times and on other occasions I can hear processing schmutz that bothers me and I go in another direction. Gain staging can also make a big difference when using all these plugs.

I forgot to add that I wound up trying to use it as both "tape coloration" and as a compressor at one point, taking off the regular compressor and just having an EQ, MPX and Loudness Maximizer on my chain and it still seemed (for me) to add too much lower end muddiness to the signal. It also unwittingly added too much bass to my bass guitar and I spent months trying to figure out why my basses always sounded HUGE in the final mix, even when I'd turn them way down. There's a lot of factors there, though, so I realize mine's not a universal experience. My mastering EQ is basically shelving, with about half-to-a-dB boost in the 80 Hz range and a little sweetening in the high end. I even tried scooping out some lower end mud before hitting MPX and it still sounded murky to me. And like you, I wasn't really happy with what Ozone did to the sound overall, but the Ozone 5 Loudness Maximizer module is actually pretty great -- probably even a few steps up from Waves L3-LL. I actually dug the overall operation of MPX quite a bit (and it might have changed or improved since v9.x), I could just never get a subtle effect out of it.

[James Steele]

To be clear, is this MPX something different that then Kramer Master Tape plug mentioned in the topic subject?

[Tobor]

To be sure, I've never experienced 'huge bass' when using Kramer Master Tape. Just gives everything a little more presence and glue. I'm conscious to roll back the trim a bit to avoid hitting it too hard and subsequently hitting the limiter too hard.

I do like Ozone 5's limiter quite a lot also, but the L3 has done it's job well as long as I don't add too much gain and is probably a little lighter on the CPU than loading Ozone.

[bayswater]

Yes, that worked. I didn't reinstall, just deleted the MOTU AU 64 bit cache. Very strange, it fixed DSP-Q and Logic too. Logic didn't scan the Kramer plugin before, but did after I had verified that the Kramer was working in DP and DSP-Q. DSP-Q didn't scan it at all -- just made it available.

I'm scratching my head over this one as well. Oh well, at least we got it working.

I heard back from Waves support. They say to run the AU Utility in the Application>Waves folder as well as deleting the caches. They also implied that we shouldn't use the VST versions in DP, and said they don't support DSP-Quattro.

[Armageddon]

To be sure, I've never experienced 'huge bass' when using Kramer Master Tape. Just gives everything a little more presence and glue. I'm conscious to roll back the trim a bit to avoid hitting it too hard and subsequently hitting the limiter too hard.

Like I said, I'm sure there's plenty of extenuating circumstances in my mixes that MPX probably accentuates ... it just didn't sound right to my ear. I had high hopes for ReelBus, too, but it really added a lot of weird compression that I didn't want. I think I've been striving for a "subtle coloration" (kind of like what you hear in the Slate VTM demos) and stuff like MPX and ReelBus seems to work better as a "tape compressor".

I do like Ozone 5's limiter quite a lot also, but the L3 has done it's job well as long as I don't add too much gain and is probably a little lighter on the CPU than loading Ozone.

I only use the Loudness Maximizer module (which, thankfully, you can load by itself in 5), though, on a tight film schedule, I'll just drop an instance of Ozone 5 with a general setting on the mastering chain.

To be clear, is this MPX something different that then Kramer Master Tape plug mentioned in the topic subject?

"Kramer MPX" was the original name of "Kramer Master Tape" in Waves 8. Not sure why they changed it in 9. Like I said in a previous post, I have no idea what else they may or may not have changed when they changed it to "Kramer Master Tape", though it looks pretty much the same.

[jloeb]

"Kramer MPX" was the original name of "Kramer Master Tape" in Waves 8. Not sure why they changed it in 9. Like I said in a previous post, I have no idea what else they may or may not have changed when they changed it to "Kramer Master Tape", though it looks pretty much the same.

Nothing else is changed; it's the same plug. My guess about the name change is that it was considered too close to Ampex for legal comfort, possibly as a result of communication from Ampex itself, which is still very much in business.

[Armageddon]

Nothing else is changed; it's the same plug. My guess about the name change is that it was considered too close to Ampex for legal comfort, possibly as a result of communication from Ampex itself, which is still very much in business.

That would have been my guess, too.