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Shooshie wrote:I wish they wouldn't make the upgrade free. Charge a small fee; anything to help pay for their work. Companies that do free upgrades have trouble in the long run. Eventually, the new-user base each year shrinks, and you've got to ask your old users to pay for something, if you want to keep developing it, so I encourage Slate to charge SOMETHING.

Or at least, don't do that very often!

Shooshie

I'm totally fine with free upgrades.

David Polich wrote:

Shooshie wrote:I wish they wouldn't make the upgrade free. Charge a small fee; anything to help pay for their work. Companies that do free upgrades have trouble in the long run. Eventually, the new-user base each year shrinks, and you've got to ask your old users to pay for something, if you want to keep developing it, so I encourage Slate to charge SOMETHING.

Or at least, don't do that very often!

Shooshie

I'm totally fine with free upgrades.

Me too, at first. Then when the company goes out of business, I start wondering if maybe it might have helped if I'd given them $25 for that upgrade. I like MOTU's way of doing it: free decimal-point updates, but paid version number upgrades.

FG-X will be a number upgrade: 2.0. They should charge for that!

Shoosh

Posting this in a couple topics. FWIW, I got a notification that Fabrice Gabriel (the FG in FG-X) who designs the algorithms for Slate Digital is interviewed on Pensado's Place. Probably worth the watch: (Jump to about 15:26 to see the segment with Fabrice)

Very interesting. I like Fabrice, and have wanted to hear his opinions on things. This interview covered a lot of territory.

Shooshie wrote:Very interesting. I like Fabrice, and have wanted to hear his opinions on things. This interview covered a lot of territory.

Got to hang out with him and have two , nice long chats at NAMM. Nice guy.

Shooshie wrote:Very interesting. I like Fabrice, and have wanted to hear his opinions on things. This interview covered a lot of territory.

I think Fabrice is sort of a "rockstar" of plug-in designers. I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but he seems kind of like the Michael Gerzon of the present day. I always look forward to what he's cooking up, as it's usually exceptional. FG-X is an amazing tool and I look forward to getting the new version when it's ready with improved and optimized algorithms. The ONLY knock on FG-X AFAIC is the very substantial processor hit that comes with it!

I remember how shocked I was when I learned how young he is, given that he's been at this for around a decade or so.

I have a couple of whizzes working with me on similar stuff (except it's for live sound vs. recording studios), but they had already been around the block before they joined our company and base much of their work on years of direct customer interaction at live shows and festivals.

I'm going to have to guess that Fabrice has simply been a great listener (of people, and of music) his whole life, and thus is one of those rare people who makes a huge mark in his 20's.

FG-X has been working flawlessly inside RX4, which is temporarily my main mastering app due to BIAS Peak Pro being 32-bit only and having not yet had time to master StudioOne's Project Mode for song mastering and CD mastering.

Whatever you do, don't stick to the presets, or you won't learn this plug-in properly. As they say in the manual, use your ears and not your eyes. It takes an investment of two to three hours to truly grasp the elegance of this plug-in and the ideal working order to get to an ideal setting, but this is a case where the user manual is so well-written that it almost serves as a tutorial on mastering itself!

The button for normalizing levels to reduce psycho-acoustic illusions while comparing dry to wet, is a lifesaver. It is easy to forget to turn it off when saving your own presets though (I do this now and then if I think I'm going to have exactly the same settings for songs from the same session, but otherwise don't generate presets at the mastering stage).

Sometimes I use the compressor, but more often than not I switch it off. It's a very good one, but I am getting good enough at my mixes now that I generally find that I don't even want multi-band compression at the mastering stage anymore. When I do, it is so minimal that it is serving more as a soft clipper before the final leveler/limiter stage.

Once I go back to older unfinished projects that weren't recorded as well, or other people's stuff that I'm polishing up, I think I'll be making greater use of the compressor. It's really nice how the modules interact with each other; much better than in tools that are built to be used as suites. It's described in the manual how this works, but I still don't fully understand what magic Fabrice did to pull this off.

On a related topic, don't forget to visit the hidden pages in the interface, for setting preferences on output level peaks and the like.

Based on evolving standards that were spurred by Thomas Lund's (of TC Electronic) work on Loudness Standards, and the tendency of modern playback environments to normalize everything, I highly recommend going into the hidden setup pages to set your maximum peak to -1.0 dB vs. the more common -0.3 dB or -0.1 dB.

It's too bad that you can't push it even lower, as things are trending that way, but I find that working at -1.0 dB has been a big boon towards more transparent masters that still have energy and are "loud".