First of all, I love this plugin (demoing it), but I’m having a problem with this plugin that I haven’t had before.
Transient Monster is sitting on my tom bus, and I have oversampling switched on. Attack and Sustain are both at about 1-2 o’clock.
Certain tom hits (which do not clip on the audio track or any of the previous plugins in the chain like compressor and EQ) are causing Transient Monster to severely distort the sound. The problem is it seems random which hits are causing the clipping. And the amount of clipping changes seemingly randomly. One time the hit will be -3dB. Then I hit stop and play again and the same tom hit will be +7.8dB this time.
Is this normal for Transient Monster? It seems like the output of the tom hit would be the same every time I play it through. Also, I thought Transient Monster didn’t allow an output of anything over 0.0dB, but I could be mistaken.
I havent seen transient monster do this before, but maybe I just never noticed this aspect of it.
I’ve updated my audio interface driver since I last used Transient Monster. Could that be what’s causing the issue? I tried increasing the buffer for the interface, but it doesn’t make a difference.
Also, Transient Monster seems to behave more “normally” the longer it has before a tom hit. Like, if I play the track 3 seconds before a tom hit, it’s more likely to act weird and clip than if I start playback 10 seconds before the same tom hit.
It’s possible for it to behave the way you describe, and here’s why…
Transient Monster defines “attack” by a rising slope of an envelope follower. It then increases the gain of that portion by effectively raising the slope of the follower. The quieter it is before a transient occurs, the steeper the apparent slope, and the louder the output is going to be. I actually have it clamped so it can only increase the gain by so much, because if it were true digital black silence (all zeroes) and then went to a big transient, it could apply huge amounts of gain and would severely clip the output. Evidently the gain limit is not sufficient in your case…that’s a no-win situation for me, because if I limit it too much, it’ll be wimpy; not enough, and we get the occasional clip as you’re seeing.
If you play back from the same point every time, you should get the same behavior every time. If you change your starting point, you can get different behavior, that’s absolutely correct and is to be expected.
Transient Monster does not have a clipper/limiter…yet. Keep your eyes and ears open and watch the site.
Your audio interface should have no impact on what’s going on inside an individual track or buss, regardless of whether Transient Monster’s being used or not.
If you can blend in a tiny bit of noise immediately ahead of the problem transient, you may be able to get rid of the problem. Alternately, you may have to automate the attack control around those notes to eliminate the behavior.
I’ll continue to evaluate if there’s a way to make the plugin “smarter” about boosting transients without making it wimpy.
Thanks for the reply! It’s good to know my DAW wasn’t glitching out.
I guess it makes sense b/c I have a Gate ont he tom tracks, so it IS going from digital black to a huge transient. I’m still a bit confused b/c I think the output peak IS changing even if I don’t change the playback start (the the playback after the tom hit IS changing). Does that make any sense?
Regardless, I appreciate your reply. Also, I don’t mind putting a limiter after Transient Monster. It won’t be ideal I suppose, since i might be limiting a huge +9.8dB signal down to -0.3dB, but it’s a lot simpler than automating haha. As long as the limiter processes in 64 bit float, there shouldn’t be any issues with this workaround, right? I could always automate the output volume before it goes to a limiter. This would be ok b/c Transient Monster processes at 64 bit internally, yes?
Hrm…not sure why it would respond differently if the playhead always starts from the same position…the plugin’s functions are deterministic…that is, given the same set of inputs, they always generate the same set of outputs. There’s no time-variant features like you’d find on a chorus or flange…
All of our plugins use 64-bit double-precision floating point internally, even if the host only passes us 32-bit data.
You might want to try gating AFTER Transient Monster…if you’re boosting attack on transients, it’ll make it break threshold on the gate more cleanly, and it should definitely help get rid of the gain spikes.
Yes, this is strange. I just double-checked, and the output is indeed changing even though I’m not changing the playhead start. I also tried automating Attack down, and it did not affect the gain spike…
Keep your eyes and ears open and watch the site.