There are a lot of great stereo imaging tools and spectrum analyzers. Most of them aren’t free though. Having a good way to visually analyze loudness, frequency distribution and stereo image is incredibly important. Unfortunately, it is often the case that most default or free solutions are barely functional. They don’t provide you with enough information to shape your mix or don’t present it in a simple, clear and understandable format. (I’m looking at you, FL studio visualizers!)
SPAN is a spectrum analysis tool that will let you monitor your peak volume, RMS and LUFS. It shows you the frequencies that are passing through the plugin and you can customize the spectrum view by changing time, frequency and level ranges. If you want even more precision and control, you can adjust the fast fourier transform sample size, it gets that technical! You can also compare channels, left and right of the same channel or two different ones. Two channel comparison is the limit of the free version, SPAN Plus allows you to display as many channels as your DAW will allow. It also features a correlation meter that measures your phase alignment (1=fully aligned and -1=completely misaligned). It can also track your loudness stats thoughout the playtime to iron out any kinks. Handy, functional and no-nonsense tool.
MSED is a stereo analysis and encoding tool. It can help you manange your side and mid channels: your stereo image. It comes with a basic set of tools that allows you to pan, change levels, swap left-right channels and flip phase 180 degrees. The visualizers are pretty simple, you have your correlation meter from before, stereo pan meter and plasma-style vector scope. You might think you don’t need it if you DAW provides stereo imaging functions of its own, but often times you’re going to be playing guessing games in terms of how that audio will actually get processed: some DAWS merge your stereo tracks to mono, some don’t. MSED takes care of that ambiguity and puts all of the necessary tools and monitoring in one spot.
These plugins are available in VST, VST3, AU and AAX for free! I really can’t recommend them enough if you’re starting out producing or are in need of simple tools that won’t take a toll on your CPU with fancy advanced processing.
SPAN Product page: https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/
MSED Product page: https://www.voxengo.com/product/msed/
cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/241390
The fact is most of free and libre plugins won’t have multiples functions embedded into one plugin. So the spectrum analysis will be one plugin, the loudness measures will be another, etc.
But it doesn’t means that those plugins are less efficient in any way. Using them rather than a voxengo one is just another way to work, not a bad way to work.
That being said Voxengo’s are great even if there is no LV2 versions for GNU/Linux.
I’d argue the speed reduction to your workflow from having to manage multiple overlapping windows is a significant drawback and there is nothing that stops free software from embedding other projects as a dependency with some user discretion. Unless you don’t have to manage the windows because of how much screen space you have or because of how those plugins work around that, I’d say having all essential stuff in one place (window) is better. I worked in FL for a long time and I’m not sure if it gets better in other DAWs. Trying out new stuff soon though
It Bitwig I’d probably group them together and use macro pages
Thing is your workflow isn’t all workflow. If you always keep all your plugins’s windows open then yes. But if you know what you’re doing you might want to have a simple plugin doing exactly what you need. It will also use a lot less memory than a big one.
Also when you play live you want to use less memory and want to know exactly what does what. And not have an EQ on every plugin you use, potently having effect additions you can’t easily check on.
That’s true, I wasn’t advocating for putting a combined plugin on everything for any other reason but workflow, the memory concern and effect additions are a really good point! That said, AFAIK SPAN shouldn’t cause any effects and being an analyzer plugin you can always disable instances you don’t need. MSED is a bit different, so no comment there. I use MSED and SPAN on pre-master channel buses so I can monitor groups of instruments and I really need all of the measurements in there to make some judgements and adding 5+ plugins to emulate their combined function will only add more surface for potential effect additions and clutter my screen. That’s where I was coming from. Maybe I’m wrong about it, let me know