foo-plugins 1.0

Evening all,

I've been frustrated with Jamins' limiter for quite a while now. I've
tried debugging it's DSP code with Steve Harris, but we have been unable
to fix the issue. 

Instead of trying yet again to fix the old, I became inspired to write a
new limiter. Thanks to the Christmas holidays, I built codename
"foo-plugins". This is a set of plugins containing a lookahead limiter. 

I'm proposing this limiter to be considered as a replacement for the
Fast Lookahead Limiter in Jamin.

http://www.studionumbersix.com/foo/

The "Foo Lookahead Limiter" was originally designed to be a drop-in
replacement for the original limiter. This means that the ports are
ordered exactly the same and the parameters are the same scale with the
same min/max values.

The main differences are:
 - This limiter does not work with "bins", therefore might take a bit
   more cpu than the original limiter.
   I have tested it a bit, and at least before adding the log curves
   (mentioned later) it took about the same amount of CPU as the Fast
   Lookahead Limiter.
 - Because there are no bins, it does perfect limiting, which the 
   original limiter couldn't guarantee. Foo Lookahead Limiter should
   never pass any peaks above the configured max peak, ever, even 
   under special conditions.
   (unless there is a bug, of course ;) )
 - The attack time is shorter, 2.5ms (the old one had 5.3ms)

Finally, I broke the binary compatibility by adding a control to change
the release curve. There is now a continuous parameter to modify the
curve from linear to logarithmic.

Geoff Beasley has done some testing on the plugin and seems to like it
very much. After his initial tests, I became convinced that the limiter
needs a logarithmic release curve. 

I discussed having this control in Jamin with Steve Harris, and we may
not want that control there. We need to set a good default for the
curve, and maybe perhaps give two or three different curves to choose
from (lin/log or lin/shallow log/steep log).

I have no real aspirations to keep these plugins separate from Steve's
plugin package. So if it's deemed to be a better idea, I'm sure we can
merge these plugins into swh-plugins - with Steve's permission of
course.

The page also contains a link to simple patch to Jamin which replaces
the Fast Lookahead Limiter with the Foo Lookahead Limiter.


  Sampo Savolainen

PS. The package also contains a dynamics controller (Foo Transient
Architect) and a distortion plugin (Foo Driver)



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